John Ruskin - Modern Painters (1843)

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

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

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
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
And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration.

John Ruskin
For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one; it is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity; and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist.

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
It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

John Ruskin
The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb. Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness — completeness of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has been, the more terrible is its corruption.

John Ruskin
There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast.

John Ruskin
No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

John Ruskin
Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.

John Ruskin
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.

John Ruskin
The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

John Ruskin
In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

John Ruskin
It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.

John Ruskin
There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

John Ruskin
Rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.
On painting Nature

John Ruskin
A monk of La Trappe, a French soldier of the Imperial Guard, and a thriving mill-owner, supposing each a type, and no more than a type, of his class, are all interesting specimens of humanity, but narrow ones, — so narrow that even all the three together would not make up a perfect man.

John Ruskin
In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.

John Ruskin
All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

John Ruskin
The foam is not cruel....The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings... produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic Fallacy."

John Ruskin
What is poetry?…The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

John Ruskin
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

John Ruskin
The word "Blue" does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not a man left on the face of the earth.

John Ruskin
Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organiation than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities.

John Ruskin
To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

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