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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
There is no wealth but life.
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.
Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.
Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
The only way to understand the difficult parts of the Bible is first to read and obey the easy ones.
A book worth reading is worth buying.
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.