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John Ruskin Quotes
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Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
John Ruskin
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Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.
John Ruskin
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If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
John Ruskin
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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
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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
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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
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Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.
John Ruskin
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
John Ruskin
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of flowers that seeds may be.
John Ruskin
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Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.
John Ruskin
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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
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The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.
John Ruskin
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
John Ruskin
Creative Commons
Born:
February 8, 1819
Died:
January 20, 1900
(aged 80)
Bio:
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist.
Known for:
The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
The Stones of Venice (1851)
Unto This Last (1860)
Sesame and lilies (1865)
Modern Painters (1843)
Most used words:
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life
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time
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