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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey.
What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant ''well-being,'' and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money.
Every great man is always being helped by everybody; for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
The training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others
The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which worthily used, will be a gift to his race forever
That thirst (for applause) if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones
Reverence is the chief joy and power of life - reverence for that which is pure and bright in youth; for what is true and tried in age; for all that is gracious among the living, great among the dead, - and marvelous in the powers that cannot die
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
I believe the first test of a truly great man is humility
Poetry is the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions
Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality