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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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 force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you.
In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.
Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.
Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.
Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
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