John Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)

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

John Ruskin
Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.

John Ruskin
All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.

John Ruskin
Ornament cannot be overcharged if it be good, and is always overcharged when it is bad.

John Ruskin
The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.

John Ruskin
But of them [the builders], and their life, and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honors, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration.

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
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
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
To build, literally to confirm, is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church building, house building, ship building, and coach building.

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
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
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 plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.

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
As a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false ornaments.

John Ruskin
Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their restraint.

John Ruskin
We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!

John Ruskin
It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.

John Ruskin
No ornaments... are so cold, clumsy, and vulgar, so essentially incapable of a fine line, or shadow, as those of cast iron.

John Ruskin
So long as we see the stones and joints, and are not deceived as to the points of support in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise than regret the dexterous artifices which compel us to feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in its branches.

John Ruskin
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

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
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.

John Ruskin
It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

John Ruskin
You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.

John Ruskin
It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.

John Ruskin
The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

John Ruskin
Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.

John Ruskin
Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.

John Ruskin