Eric Gill Quotes

#1. Look after goodness and truth, beauty will look after herself.

Eric Gill

#2. That state is a state of slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him.

Eric Gill

#3. Continued experiment with dog today.

Eric Gill

#4. Man cannot live on the human plane, he must be either above or below it.

Eric Gill

#5. The free man does what he likes in his working time and in his spare time what is required of him. The slave does what he is obliged to do in his working time and what he likes to do only when he is not at work.

Eric Gill

#6. The value of the creative faculty derives from the fact that faculty is the primary mark of man. To deprive man of its exercise is to reduce him to subhumanity.

Eric Gill

#7. It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal.

Eric Gill

#8. Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.

Eric Gill

#9. Art itself has become an extraordinary thing - the activity of peculiar people - people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.

Eric Gill

#10. Ultimately there is no happiness in a world in which things are not as good as they can be.

Eric Gill

#11. Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.

Eric Gill

#12. If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.

Eric Gill

#13. The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences. No one can say that the O's roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl's breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.

Eric Gill

#14. Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Eric Gill

#15. Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.

Eric Gill

#16. Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it
that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Eric Gill

#17. There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.

Eric Gill

#18. The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

Eric Gill

#19. If you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself.

Eric Gill

#20. Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

Eric Gill