It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I … - Kenneth Clark

His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.

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.

As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn't so difficult to recognize barbarism.