Adversaria (32)
‘If a child has many toys, it will get tired of them and break them; if a boy has many prints he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure in them is perfected, and his attention concentrated’ —John Ruskin (Elements of Drawing, p. 10)
‘Get it more tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful’ —John Ruskin (Elements of Drawing, p. 51)
‘We must take care to be right, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find we can be right with freedom.’ —John Ruskin (Elements of Drawing, p. 64)
‘…in general, everything that you think very ugly will be good for you to draw’ —John Ruskin (Elements of Drawing, p. 109)
‘The quantity of purple and gray in Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery’ —John Ruskin (Elements of Drawing, p. 144)
‘Rivers in this way are just like wise men, who keep one side of their life for play, and another for work; and can be brilliant, and chattering, and transparent, when they are at ease, and yet take deep counsel on the other side when they set themselves to their main purpose. And rivers are just in this divided, also, like wicked and good men: the good rivers have serviceable deep places all along their banks, that ships can sail in; but the wicked rivers go scooping irregularly under their banks until they get full of strangling eddies, which no boat can row over without being twisted against the rocks; and pools like wells, which no one can get out of but the water-kelpie that lives at the bottom; but, wicked or good, the rivers all agree in having two kinds of sides’ —John Ruskin (Elements of Drawing, p. 172)
‘But this reading of mine is not altogether fruitless. I learn a little something every day, even if only superficially, and this is the reason why my love of Greek literature has come back so strong: I am becoming acquainted, in his own language, with an author [Aristotle] who is practically speechless and ridiculus in translation’ —Poggius Bracciolini (letter VIII in Two Renaissance Book Hunters, trans. P.W.G. Gordan, p. 43)
‘Sometimes though, he steals a little time for himself which he spends on reading. He is anxious to have some books which may encourage him to study’ —Poggius Bracciolini (letter XXXIII in Two Renaissance Book Hunters, trans. P.W.G. Gordan, p. 91)
‘Burton’s discourse is not lacking in the complexity, learnedness and wide frame of reference which normally characterises it. The simple, brief instructions scattered within this discourse are not trite (as perhaps they would be if they were heaped together) but refreshing. There is something disarming in an author like Burton telling the reader, “Cheare up” (II, 167), especially when that comment is sandwiched between some Latin verse of Theocritus and another, unattributed Latin quotation from Tibullus. One cannot help but be cheered up by it’ —Mary Ann Lund (Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 193)