John Ruskin - Nature Quotes

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I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.

John Ruskin
Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.

John Ruskin
All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

John Ruskin
The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.

John Ruskin
Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own propel nature, and without assistance or combination, water is the most wonderful.

John Ruskin
Nature is never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, but always abundant; you always see something, but you never see all.

John Ruskin
It [a snake] is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth - of the entire earthly nature. As the bird is the clothed power of the air, so this is the clothed power of the dust; as the bird the symbol of the spirit of life, so this of the grasp and sting of death.

John Ruskin
The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form.

John Ruskin
Science and art are commonly distinguished by the nature of their actions; the one as knowing, the other as changing, producing, or creating.

John Ruskin
Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.

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

John Ruskin
Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself -my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness -darkness -bitter mockery of herself -is the most desolating.

John Ruskin
I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.

John Ruskin
This rock [marble], then, is prepared by Nature for the sculptor and architect, just as paper is prepared by the manufacturer for the artist, with as great - nay, with greater - care, and more perfect adaptation of the material to the requirements.

John Ruskin
You cannot get anything out of nature or from God by gambling; only out of your neighbor.

John Ruskin
My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.

John Ruskin
The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.

John Ruskin
High art consists neither in altering, nor in improving nature; but in seeking throughout nature for 'whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure;' in loving these, in displaying to the utmost of the painter's power such loveliness as is in them, and directing the thoughts of others to them by winning art, or gentle emphasis.

John Ruskin
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

John Ruskin
This is the true nature of home - it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.

John Ruskin
It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.

John Ruskin
In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.

John Ruskin
Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.

John Ruskin
In general, when the imagination is at all noble, it is irresistible, and therefore those who can at all resist it ought to resist it. Be a plain topographer if you possibly can; if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet.

John Ruskin
Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent.

John Ruskin