Eric Gill famous quotes

07-16-2025

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.
-- Eric Gill

#Real #Bridges #Iron
Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.
-- Eric Gill

#Art #Skills #Firsts
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
-- Eric Gill

#Artist #Different #Kind
If you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself.
-- Eric Gill

#Design #Looks #Care
If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.
-- Eric Gill

#Looks #Goodness
There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.
-- Eric Gill

#Design #Different #Letters
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

#War #Catholic #Religion
Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.
-- Eric Gill

#Philosophy #Men
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

#Art #Exercise #Men
It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal.
-- Eric Gill

#Design #Typography #Testing
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

#Writing #Character #Men
Continued experiment with dog today.
-- Eric Gill

#Dog #Design #Today
Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.
-- Eric Gill

#Practice #Legibility
The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences. No one can say that the Oâ€™s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girlâ€™s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.
-- Eric Gill

#Girl #Moon #Apples
Letters are things, not pictures of things.
-- Eric Gill

#Letters
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

#Men #Doe #Bread
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

#Men #Doe #Slavery
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

#Art #People #Peculiar

You may also like:

Adrian Frutiger
Typeface Creator
Beatrice Warde
Journalist
David Carson
Graphic Designer
Erik Spiekermann
Graphic Designer
Frederic Goudy
Type designer
Giambattista Bodoni
Type designer
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Artist
Herb Lubalin
Graphic Designer
Jacob Epstein
Sculptor
Jan Tschichold
Writer
Louis of Granada
Writer
Massimo Vignelli
Designer
Matthew Carter
Type designer
Michael Bierut
Graphic Designer
Neville Brody
Graphic Designer
Stanley Morison
Type designer
Stefan Sagmeister
Graphic Designer
William Shakespeare
Poet
Zuzana Licko
Graphic Designer