John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.

John Ruskin
Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.

John Ruskin
I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.

John Ruskin
All that is fantastic in form, or frivolous in detail, annihilates the aristocratic air of a building: it at once destroys its sublimity and size, besides awakening, as is almost always the case, associations of a mean and low character.

John Ruskin
What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.

John Ruskin
Ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.

John Ruskin
Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.

John Ruskin
In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.

John Ruskin
Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.

John Ruskin
One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.

John Ruskin
Science does its duty, not in telling us the causes of spots in the sun, but in explaining to us the laws of our own life, and the consequences of their violation.

John Ruskin
When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

John Ruskin
We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.

John Ruskin
Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.

John Ruskin
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

John Ruskin
Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

John Ruskin
You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.

John Ruskin
Men say their pinnacles point to heaven. Why, so does every tree that buds, and every bird that rises as it sings. Men say their aisles are good for worship. Why, so is every mountain glen and rough sea-shore. But this they have of distinct and indisputable glory,--that their mighty walls were never raised, and never shall be, but by men who love and aid each other in their weakness.

John Ruskin
The material which Nature furnishes, in any given country, and the form which she suggests, will always render the building the most beautiful...

John Ruskin
A gentleman's first characteristic is that fineness of structure in the body which renders it capable of the most delicate sensation; and of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies; one may say simply "fineness of nature.

John Ruskin
Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.

John Ruskin
The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves... also Makes Them Most
Serviceable to Others

John Ruskin
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.

John Ruskin
It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.

John Ruskin
To build, literally to confirm, is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church building, house building, ship building, and coach building.

John Ruskin
We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

John Ruskin
Then are no natural object out of which more can be thus learned than out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward a patient observer.

John Ruskin
It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

John Ruskin
It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

John Ruskin
Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.

John Ruskin