John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

Nobody in the world could draw them [violet's flower stalk], they are so mixed up together, and crumpled and hacked about, as if some ill-natured child had snipped them with blunt scissors, and an ill-natured cow chewed them a little afterwards and left them, proved for too tough or too bitter.

John Ruskin
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection.

John Ruskin
If you look for curves, you will see curves; if you look for angles, you will see angles.

John Ruskin
Do justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him because you don't love him, and you will come to hate him.

John Ruskin
There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree.

John Ruskin
Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.

John Ruskin
It is utterly impossible for an edifice altogether of brick to look affected or absurd; it may look rude, it may look vulgar, it may look disgusting, in a wrong place; but it cannot look foolish, for it is incapable of pretension.

John Ruskin
The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.

John Ruskin
In no art is there closer connection between our delight in the work, and our admiration of the workman's mind, than in architecture, and yet we rarely ask for a builder's name.

John Ruskin
Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

John Ruskin
The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

John Ruskin
In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base.

John Ruskin
God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.

John Ruskin
Our object, let it always be remembered, is not the attainment of architectural data, but the formation of taste.

John Ruskin
The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.

John Ruskin
Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

John Ruskin
Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.

John Ruskin
If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.

John Ruskin
Whether we force the man's property from him by pinching his stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically; morally, none whatsoever.

John Ruskin
In all arts or sciences, before we can determine what is just or beautiful in a group, we must ascertain what is desirable in the parts which compose it.

John Ruskin
I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)

John Ruskin
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.

John Ruskin
No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

John Ruskin
Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.

John Ruskin
It is not so much in buying pictures as in being pictures, that you can encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty of form in a marble image, but that which educates your children into living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.

John Ruskin
The sculptor must paint with his chisel; half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.

John Ruskin
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.

John Ruskin
Of all embellishments by which the efforts of man can enhance the beauty of natural scenery, those are the most effective which can give animation to the scene, while the spirit which they bestow is in unison with its general character.

John Ruskin
If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.

John Ruskin
The Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth.

John Ruskin