John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskinwas the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy. His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. Ruskin penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth8 February 1819
Morality does not depend on religion.
Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.
I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions... Nor has the Church's ardent "desire to depart, and be with Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure.
All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.
The greatest reward is not what we receive for our labor, but what we become by it.
If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.
No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.
The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
No one can do me any good by loving me; I have more love than I need or could do any good with; but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.
I know well that happiness is in little things.
As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.
It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me the most to learn, and which was to my childish mind the most repulsive - Psalm 119 - has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God.
There is no music in a “rest” that I know of, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody.