I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.
Marcel Proust's preface (1910) to John Ruskin "The Bible of Amiens" translated by Marcel Proust (1904); later quoted in "Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin" translated by Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (p. 57), 1987.
