Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by Eric Gill

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing thing. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it requires simply good sense in the originators & good will in the rest of us.

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

Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building -- like Tower Bridge -- or a classical front put on a steel frame -- like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living -- not something added, like sugar on a pill.

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.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

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.

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.

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

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

Continued experiment with dog today.

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

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.

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

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.

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