John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their restraint.

John Ruskin
If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.

John Ruskin
True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.

John Ruskin
No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

John Ruskin
Greatness is the aggregation of minuteness; nor can its sublimity be felt truthfully by any mind unaccustomed to the affectionate watching of what is least.

John Ruskin
The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.

John Ruskin
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.

John Ruskin
No one can do me any good by loving me; I have more love than I need or could do any good with; but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.

John Ruskin
It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.

John Ruskin
All good color is in some degree pensive, tho loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

John Ruskin
That which is required in order to the attainment of accurate conclusions respecting the essence of the Beautiful is nothing morethan earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to our impressions of it.

John Ruskin
If some people really see angels where others see only empty space, let them paint the angels: only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.

John Ruskin
Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own propel nature, and without assistance or combination, water is the most wonderful.

John Ruskin
All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest, is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye.

John Ruskin
The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so.

John Ruskin
In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.

John Ruskin
I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.

John Ruskin
To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.

John Ruskin