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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.
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.
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.
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
Civilization is the making of civil persons.
The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.