John Ruskin Quotes

The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.

If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

It is not the temptations you have, but the decision you make about them that counts.

An artist should always bite the hand that feeds him - but not too hard.

a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer.

He shook hands with Margaret. He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she was perfectly unconscious of the fact.

Anything that's really good, everybody wants to put their hands on. The multimedia puts their hands on it and everything happens that makes it global. Then people forget the roots of it and people forget why they care about it, and then it gets torn apart and turns so commercial that you don't even know what the essence of this art form is even about.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.

You can't steal an artist's songs and also tell him he can't license that music to a commercial.

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

Whoever said that artists shouldn't pay attention to their business was probably someone w/their hand in some artist's pocket.

With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.

Until now their line has been that the Tories are incapable of doing anything about poverty, and aren't interested in doing it in the first place. By contrast, Labour says, we are also incapable of doing anything about poverty, but would dearly love to do something. If we knew what.

Good and evil are essential differences of the act of the will. For good and evil pertain essentially to the will; just as truth and falsehood pertain to the reason, the act of which is distinguished essentially by the difference of truth and falsehood (according as we say that an opinion is true or false.) Consequently, good and evil volition are acts differing in species.

(As) a director who is a writer, I have respect for writers, so I'm less likely to step on an idea or a line.

I think the reason I was able to get the jobs I did is because I worked for some very strong, self-possessed filmmakers who wouldn't listen to the executive-suited wisdom, and they believed in me from director to actor. Not from salesman to commodity.

On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’

Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.

In music industry they always want you to write something like the one that was popular. And that's something you kind of have to just - sometimes you just say yes to people, like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure," and then you just write the one you want to write.

You must first of all think justly. Don’t sit in judgment over others when you don’t know the truth of the matter.

There are two ways, one is right; the other is wrong. If your work is only about right, then it is wrong.

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.