Quote

You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.

John Ruskin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Ruskin
Age: 80 †
Born: 1819
Born: February 8
Died: 1900
Died: January 20
Aesthetician
Architect
Art Critic
Art Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Kata Phusin
Rŏsŭkʻin
J. Ruskin
John Rosukin
Jon Rasukin
Dzhon Rëskin
Ruskin
Character
National
Good
Asking
Prevalent
Life
Advice
Eager
People
Taste
Occasion
Expression
Produced
Beauty
Occasions
Desire
Architecture
Cannot
Merely

More quotes by John Ruskin

Image
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
John Ruskin
Image
The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
John Ruskin
Image
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
John Ruskin
Image
We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.
John Ruskin
Image
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil buy it, by compromise with evil.
John Ruskin
Image
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.
John Ruskin
Image
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
John Ruskin
Image
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
John Ruskin
Image
Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.
John Ruskin
Image
In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
John Ruskin
Image
All the other passions do occasional good, but whenever pride puts in its word, everything goes wrong, and what it might really be desirable to do, quietly and innocently, it is mortally dangerous to do, proudly.
John Ruskin
Image
A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.
John Ruskin
Image
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.
John Ruskin
Image
Death is not a journey into an unknown land it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.
John Ruskin
Image
Genius is only a superior power of seeing.
John Ruskin
Image
Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.
John Ruskin
Image
No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
John Ruskin
Image
To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.
John Ruskin
Image
The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
John Ruskin
Image
We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!
John Ruskin