Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!