John Ruskin Quotes

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

You need the art in order to love the life.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

The proper response to a great work of art is to enter it as though there were nothing else in the world.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

Art is a sense of magic.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.