John Ruskin Quotes

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

I think great art comes from being open and creative with somebody, and of course, if feelings start getting involved in that, it can either make things fantastic or really messy.

Art finds a way to be constructive. It becomes heat in cold places; it becomes light in dark places.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.

I am interested in solving an unknown factor of art and an unknown factor of life.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

Art is a self-replicating force.

People can be chaos but it's hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made. It's hard.

Art never comes from happiness.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

Art is love and it covers. It sheilds.

For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.

Art is the great stimulus to life.

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

Art and life go together. I have to have a life filled with experiences to make art, and I have to have art around me to live well.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.