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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.
Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
Civilization is the making of civil persons.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.
All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree not of a cloud.
Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.
In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.
It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.