John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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