“And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.”

Share & Save

Meaning

Not documented yet.

When It Was Said

Not documented yet.

Who It Was Said To

Not documented yet.

Historical Context

Not documented yet.

Source

Not documented yet.

Original Language & Translation

Originally said in English.

Did They Really Say It?

Not documented yet.

Did You Know?

Not documented yet.

About John Ruskin

English writer and art critic

John Ruskin was an English Victorian polymath, active as a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman, and philanthropist. He is known for the breadth of his work and for the many fields he wrote about. His writing ranged across art and architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology, botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth. That range made him an unusually wide-ranging public intellectual, with work that moved freely between the arts and the natural world.

More from John Ruskin (136 quotes) →

READ THE SOURCE

Books by John Ruskin

The Seven Lamps of Architecture

2000

VIEW ON AMAZON

Unto This Last

2006

VIEW ON AMAZON

The Stones of Venice

2007

VIEW ON AMAZON

Mornings in Florence

1881

VIEW ON AMAZON

Lectures on art delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870

2007

VIEW ON AMAZON