John Ruskin - The Stones of Venice (1851)

41 Sourced Quotes

View all John Ruskin Quotes
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

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
We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.

John Ruskin
The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.

John Ruskin
The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.

John Ruskin
Humanity and Immortality consist neither in reason, nor in love; not in the body, nor in the animation of the heart of it, nor in the thoughts and stirrings of the brain of it;--but in the dedication of them all to Him who will raise them up at the last day.

John Ruskin
What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.

John Ruskin
In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.

John Ruskin
Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

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
The foundation of every natural science is now at last firmly laid, not a day passing without some addition of buttress and pinnacle to their already magnificent fabric.

John Ruskin
A power of obtaining veracity in the representation of material and tangible things, which, within certain limits and conditions, is unimpeachable, has now been placed in the hands of all men, almost without labour. (1853)

John Ruskin
Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.

John Ruskin
Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

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
In no art is there closer connection between our delight in the work, and our admiration of the workman's mind, than in architecture, and yet we rarely ask for a builder's name.

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

John Ruskin
The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.

John Ruskin
No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.

John Ruskin
All good color is in some degree pensive, tho loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

John Ruskin
To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.

John Ruskin
Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect in its own bad way.

John Ruskin
No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

John Ruskin
We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts.

John Ruskin
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

John Ruskin
In old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting.

John Ruskin
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

John Ruskin
The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things.

John Ruskin
You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him.

John Ruskin
There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.

John Ruskin