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John Ruskin

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Biography | All Poems | Best Poems | Short Poems | Quotes

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was 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 ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to 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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded by a preference for plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, and architectural structures and ornamentation.


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Quotes

Here are a few random quotes by John Ruskin.

See also: All John Ruskin Quotes

Quote Left The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. Quote Right
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Quote Left It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have... insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled. Quote Right
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Quote Left There is hardly anything
in the world
that some man
cannot make a little worse
cannot make a little cheaper
and the people
who consider price only
are this man’s lawful prey.
Quote Right
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Quote Left In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it. Quote Right
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Quote Left Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade. Quote Right
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Book: Reflection on the Important Things