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There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.
John Ruskin -
Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.
John Ruskin
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A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
John Ruskin -
All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.
John Ruskin -
Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.
John Ruskin -
No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.
John Ruskin -
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
John Ruskin -
English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.
John Ruskin
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If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
John Ruskin -
The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so.
John Ruskin -
The artist's business is to feel, although he may think a little sometimes... when he has nothing better to do.
John Ruskin -
That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.
John Ruskin -
No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.
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
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Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
John Ruskin -
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
John Ruskin -
Drunkenness is not only the cause of crime, but it is crime; and if any encourage drunkenness for the sake of the profit derived from the sale of drink, they are guilty of a form of moral assassination as criminal as any that has ever been practiced by the braves of any country or of any age.
John Ruskin -
The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.
John Ruskin -
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.
John Ruskin -
There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.
John Ruskin
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All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree - not of a cloud.
John Ruskin -
As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite--variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite--energy. It is the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.
John Ruskin -
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin -
We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: - the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, - the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.
John Ruskin