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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.
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.
Sky is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.
That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green.
Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.
In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.
Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing, which if you destroy, you make yourself cold and dull.
Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station... There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads... Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work.
Society has sacrificed its virtues to the Goddess of Getting Along.
No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.
The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
You may sell your work, but not your soul.
As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin