John Ruskin Art Quotations

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

Never has interest in art been so high, and never has quality been so low.

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.

Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; .in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.

Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing.

He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.

the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.

Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.

The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.

Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.

If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.

You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.

Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.

Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.

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.

Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.

Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.

Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.

To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.

Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people

All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

High art consists neither in altering, nor in improving nature; but in seeking throughout nature for 'whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure;' in loving these, in displaying to the utmost of the painter's power such loveliness as is in them, and directing the thoughts of others to them by winning art, or gentle emphasis.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.