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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.
There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.
The Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth.
Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their restraint.
No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.
In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base.
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.
Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble finger, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain,--which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.
In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.
Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.
True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection.
The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.