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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.
In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.
If you do not wish for His kingdom do not pray for it. But if you do you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it.
Work first, and then rest.
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
It is, indeed, right that we should look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the day of God; but not that we should check any human effort by anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future ages.
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
The best work never was and never will be done for money.
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
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