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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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 higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.
The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.
Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
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.
The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms and spices... It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat.
The best thing in life aren't things.
The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.
Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organiation than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities.
One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.
When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work.