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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.
It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.
The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.