John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law.

John Ruskin
Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.

John Ruskin
The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.

John Ruskin
There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.

John Ruskin
The reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of flowers that seeds may be.

John Ruskin
Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.

John Ruskin
Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.

John Ruskin
The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.

John Ruskin
God shows us in Himself, strange as it may seem, not only authoritative perfection, but even the perfection of obedience--an obedience to His own laws; and in the cumbrous movement of those unwieldiest of his creatures we are reminded, even in His divine essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the human creature "that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.

John Ruskin
Everything about it [a building] should be natural, and should appear as if the influences and forces which were in operation around it had been too strong to be resisted, and had rendered all efforts of art to check their power, or conceal the evidence of their action, entirely unavailing.

John Ruskin
As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.

John Ruskin
Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.

John Ruskin
All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

John Ruskin
Every citizen may box himself up in as barbarous a tenement as suits his taste or inclination; the architect is his vassal, and must permit him not only to criticise, but to perpetuate.

John Ruskin
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.

John Ruskin
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

John Ruskin
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin

John Ruskin
Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station... There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads... Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work.

John Ruskin
The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

John Ruskin
No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.

John Ruskin
To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.

John Ruskin
Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates.

John Ruskin
Courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the mark of a gentleman or a lady; but it becomes vulgar if rude or insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a characteristic of race or fineness of make. A fawn is not vulgar in being timid, nor a crocodile "gentle" because courageous.

John Ruskin
It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things by help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.

John Ruskin
Perhaps nothing is more curious in the history of the human mind than the way in which the science of botany has become oppressed by nomenclature.

John Ruskin
Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.

John Ruskin
As a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false ornaments.

John Ruskin
Perhaps the first question which an intelligent child would think of asking about a tree: "Mamma, how does it make its trunk?", and you may open one botanical work after another, and good ones too, and by sensible men - you shall not find this child's question fairly put, much less fairly answered.

John Ruskin
English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.

John Ruskin
Indolence watches the tooth of Time with careless eye and nerveless hand.

John Ruskin