John Ruskin - Modern Painters (1843)

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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
If you look for curves, you will see curves; if you look for angles, you will see angles.

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
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
Courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the mark of a gentleman or a lady; but it becomes vulgar if rude or insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a characteristic of race or fineness of make. A fawn is not vulgar in being timid, nor a crocodile "gentle" because courageous.

John Ruskin
Perhaps nothing is more curious in the history of the human mind than the way in which the science of botany has become oppressed by nomenclature.

John Ruskin
Perhaps the first question which an intelligent child would think of asking about a tree: "Mamma, how does it make its trunk?", and you may open one botanical work after another, and good ones too, and by sensible men - you shall not find this child's question fairly put, much less fairly answered.

John Ruskin
English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.

John Ruskin
No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

John Ruskin
Greatness is the aggregation of minuteness; nor can its sublimity be felt truthfully by any mind unaccustomed to the affectionate watching of what is least.

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
All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest, is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye.

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
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
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
Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing.

John Ruskin
Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

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

John Ruskin
Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.

John Ruskin
Then are no natural object out of which more can be thus learned than out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward a patient observer.

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

John Ruskin
Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.

John Ruskin
Every single leaf-cluster presents the general aspect of a little family, entirely at unity among themselves, but obliged to get their living by various shifts, concessions, and infringements of the family rules, in order not to invade the privileges of other people in their neighborhood.

John Ruskin
The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

John Ruskin
The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its dependency of language or expression.

John Ruskin
The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.

John Ruskin
He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.

John Ruskin
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic Fallacy."

John Ruskin