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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
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.
I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out.
I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.