“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.”
More from John Ruskin on Art
“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.”
“Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.”
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.”
“All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.”
“Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.”
“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
John Keats
10 quotes“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
Jackson Pollock
7 quotes“The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”
W.H. Auden
7 quotes“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.”