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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.
Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.
The wisest men are wise to the full in death.
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.
You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.
A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.
It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers.
If you do not wish for His kingdom do not pray for it. But if you do you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it.
Work first, and then rest.
If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.
Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.