John Ruskin Quotes

438 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

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
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
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
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
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
Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

John Ruskin
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
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.

John Ruskin
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
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
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
If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.

John Ruskin
Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.

John Ruskin
Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

John Ruskin
The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.

John Ruskin
Our object, let it always be remembered, is not the attainment of architectural data, but the formation of taste.

John Ruskin
God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.

John Ruskin
In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base.

John Ruskin
The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

John Ruskin
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection.

John Ruskin
Nobody in the world could draw them [violet's flower stalk], they are so mixed up together, and crumpled and hacked about, as if some ill-natured child had snipped them with blunt scissors, and an ill-natured cow chewed them a little afterwards and left them, proved for too tough or too bitter.

John Ruskin