John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

The spirit needs several sorts of food of which knowledge is only one.

John Ruskin
There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.

John Ruskin
The serpent is a honeysuckle with a head put on.

John Ruskin
In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

John Ruskin
If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

John Ruskin
The foundation of every natural science is now at last firmly laid, not a day passing without some addition of buttress and pinnacle to their already magnificent fabric.

John Ruskin
Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.

John Ruskin
The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.

John Ruskin
It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me the most to learn, and which was to my childish mind the most repulsive - Psalm 119 - has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God.

John Ruskin
Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, — strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.

John Ruskin
All the best things and treasures of this world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snow-ball, higher and higher, larger and larger, along the Alps of human power.

John Ruskin
The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.

John Ruskin
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.

John Ruskin
The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a gift also to his race forever.

John Ruskin
We must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes.

John Ruskin
On the cellular surface of one of the blocks of it [the volcano at Yewdale Crag], you may find more beauty, and learn more precious things, than with telescope or photograph from all the moons in the milky way, though every drop of it were another solar system.

John Ruskin
A power of obtaining veracity in the representation of material and tangible things, which, within certain limits and conditions, is unimpeachable, has now been placed in the hands of all men, almost without labour. (1853)

John Ruskin
There is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour, in which nature does not exhibit color which no mortal effort can imitate or approach. For all our artificial pigments are, even when seen under the same circumstances, dead and lightless beside her living color; nature exhibits her hues under an intensity of sunlight which trebles their brilliancy.

John Ruskin
Ornament cannot be overcharged if it be good, and is always overcharged when it is bad.

John Ruskin
People are always expecting to get peace in heaven: but you know whatever peace they get there will be ready-made. Whatever making of peace they can be blest for, must be on the earth here.

John Ruskin
You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required--and content that He should indeed require no more of you--than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.

John Ruskin
It [a bird] rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, out races it — i s the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.

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
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
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