John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.

John Ruskin
Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.

John Ruskin
Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.

John Ruskin
Hope- the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached here after.

John Ruskin
As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime.

John Ruskin
Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.

John Ruskin
It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

John Ruskin
It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

John Ruskin
Then are no natural object out of which more can be thus learned than out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward a patient observer.

John Ruskin
We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

John Ruskin
To build, literally to confirm, is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church building, house building, ship building, and coach building.

John Ruskin
It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.

John Ruskin
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.

John Ruskin
The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves... also Makes Them Most
Serviceable to Others

John Ruskin
Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.

John Ruskin
A gentleman's first characteristic is that fineness of structure in the body which renders it capable of the most delicate sensation; and of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies; one may say simply "fineness of nature.

John Ruskin
The material which Nature furnishes, in any given country, and the form which she suggests, will always render the building the most beautiful...

John Ruskin
Men say their pinnacles point to heaven. Why, so does every tree that buds, and every bird that rises as it sings. Men say their aisles are good for worship. Why, so is every mountain glen and rough sea-shore. But this they have of distinct and indisputable glory,--that their mighty walls were never raised, and never shall be, but by men who love and aid each other in their weakness.

John Ruskin
You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.

John Ruskin
Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

John Ruskin
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

John Ruskin
Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.

John Ruskin
We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.

John Ruskin
When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

John Ruskin
Science does its duty, not in telling us the causes of spots in the sun, but in explaining to us the laws of our own life, and the consequences of their violation.

John Ruskin
One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.

John Ruskin
Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.

John Ruskin
We have no natural history of birds written yet. It cannot be written but by a scholar and a gentleman; and no English gentleman in recent times has ever thought of birds except as flying targets, or flavourous dishes.

John Ruskin
The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.

John Ruskin
So long as we see the stones and joints, and are not deceived as to the points of support in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise than regret the dexterous artifices which compel us to feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in its branches.

John Ruskin