John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)
Strong and continuing international advocate for sustainability and protecting the environment, Christian socialist, leading Victorian era art critic, poet, philanthropist, and social thinker; Ruskin wrote over 250 manuscripts, influencing his contemporaries and many strands continuing today into modern culture. Admired by Proust, Gandhi, and Ryuzo Mikimoto in Japan; Leo Tolstoy called him, "one of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times.” Emphasizing the unity of nature, art, and culture; he developed principles for an ideal society which were used to set up many “Utopian Colonies.” His ideas helped found the modern Olympic Games, the British welfare state, many kind of social insurance programs, as well as the “garden city movement” that first included "greenbelts" in urban planning.
Ad Valorem
Fors Clavigera, 1871
Modern Painters, 1860
Stones of Venice, 1853
The Two Paths
Time and Tide, letter 5
“That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings”
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“the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless”
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“Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
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“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”
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“There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.”
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“The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation”
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“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.”
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“He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of their works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.”
from Modern Painters, 1860
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“Labor without joy is base. Labor without sorrow is base. Joy without labor is base.”
from Time and Tide, letter 5
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“What Egyptian worship of garlic or crocodile was ever so damnable as the modern worship of money?”
from Fors Clavigera, 1871
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“You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil, buy it by compromise with evil.”
from The Two Paths
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“Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave... [It] is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.”
from Stones of Venice, 1853
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“In a community regulated by laws of demand and supply... those who become rich are—generally speaking—industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant.”
from Ad Valorem
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“I never did–till this day–read anything so glorious.”
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“Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.”
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“One of the most remarkable men not only of England and of our generation, but of all countries and times.”
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