I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

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.