The Lamp of Memory

"... a picture of Titian's, or a Green statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality - it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in fine art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call 'loveliness' - (we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of things which deserve to be hated); and it is not indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is the vital function of all our being. What we like determines want we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character." Palavras sábias de John Ruskin num dos meus livros de cabeceira, The Lamp of Memory, à sombra de Turner.