John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of precious stones, or of the sea and air, and the blue mountains, and the evening and the morning, and the clouds of Heaven, were given for - they only know who can see them and can feel, and who pray that the sight and the love of them may be prolonged, where cheeks will not fade, nor sunsets die.

John Ruskin

The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.

John Ruskin

The constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts, and to strengthen them for the help of others.

John Ruskin

Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.

John Ruskin

Science and art are commonly distinguished by the nature of their actions; the one as knowing, the other as changing, producing, or creating.

John Ruskin

Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.

John Ruskin

I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be within and without:... with such differences as might suit and express each man's character and occupation, and partly his history.

John Ruskin

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

John Ruskin

I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.

John Ruskin

But of them [the builders], and their life, and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honors, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration.

John Ruskin

Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

John Ruskin

These, and such undeveloping leaves, wherever they occur, are called "bracts" by botanists, a good word, from the Latin "bractea," meaning a piece of metal plate, so thin as to crackle. They seem always a little stiff, like bad parchment, - born to come to nothing - a sort of infinitesimal fairy-lawyer's deed.

John Ruskin

Do but give it [stone] some reverence and watchfulness, and there is bread of thought in it, more than in any other lowly feature of all the landscape.

John Ruskin

The value of architecture depended on two distinct characters: — the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation.

John Ruskin

It is not possible for a... man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky.

John Ruskin

There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

John Ruskin

I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower [violet] is lifted on a lanky, awkward, springless, and yet stiff flower-stalk; which is not round, as a flower-stalk ought to be, but obstinately square, and fluted, with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an iron-foundry for a cheap railway station.

John Ruskin

Temperance, in the nobler sense, does not mean a subdued and imperfect energy; it does not mean a stopping short in any good thing, as in love and in faith; but it means the power which governs the most intense energy, and prevents its acting in way but as it ought.

John Ruskin

Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.

John Ruskin

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.

John Ruskin

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

John Ruskin

You see that one-half of it can move anywhere without stirring the other; and accordingly you may see a foot or two of a large snake's body moving one way, and another foot or two moving the other way, and a bit between not moving at all; which I, altogether, think we may specifically call 'Parliamentary' motion...

John Ruskin

Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.

John Ruskin

It is better to know the habits of one plant than the names of a thousand; and wiser to be happily familiar with those that grow in the nearest field, than arduously cognizant of all that plume the isles of the Pacific, or illumine the Mountains of the Moon.

John Ruskin

It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.

John Ruskin

He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.

John Ruskin

Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing.

John Ruskin

The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form.

John Ruskin

It [a snake] is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth - of the entire earthly nature. As the bird is the clothed power of the air, so this is the clothed power of the dust; as the bird the symbol of the spirit of life, so this of the grasp and sting of death.

John Ruskin

Nature is never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, but always abundant; you always see something, but you never see all.

John Ruskin