John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.

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
Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.

John Ruskin
The reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of flowers that seeds may be.

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 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
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
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
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
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
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
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.

John Ruskin
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
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
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.

John Ruskin
The value of architecture depended on two distinct characters: — the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation.

John Ruskin
It is not possible for a... man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky.

John Ruskin
There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

John Ruskin
I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower [violet] is lifted on a lanky, awkward, springless, and yet stiff flower-stalk; which is not round, as a flower-stalk ought to be, but obstinately square, and fluted, with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an iron-foundry for a cheap railway station.

John Ruskin
Temperance, in the nobler sense, does not mean a subdued and imperfect energy; it does not mean a stopping short in any good thing, as in love and in faith; but it means the power which governs the most intense energy, and prevents its acting in way but as it ought.

John Ruskin
Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.

John Ruskin
Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.

John Ruskin
He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.

John Ruskin
It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.

John Ruskin
It is better to know the habits of one plant than the names of a thousand; and wiser to be happily familiar with those that grow in the nearest field, than arduously cognizant of all that plume the isles of the Pacific, or illumine the Mountains of the Moon.

John Ruskin
Do but give it [stone] some reverence and watchfulness, and there is bread of thought in it, more than in any other lowly feature of all the landscape.

John Ruskin
You see that one-half of it can move anywhere without stirring the other; and accordingly you may see a foot or two of a large snake's body moving one way, and another foot or two moving the other way, and a bit between not moving at all; which I, altogether, think we may specifically call 'Parliamentary' motion...

John Ruskin