John Ruskin Quotes
-
It is, indeed, right that we should look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the day of God; but not that we should check any human effort by anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future ages.
-
The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
-
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.
-
Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.
-
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.
-
Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
-
God gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault.
-
It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend.
-
... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)
-
Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.
-
The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
-
Like other beautiful things in this world, its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.
-
A man is known to his dog by the smell, to his tailor by the coat, to his friend by the smile; each of these know him, but how little or how much depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man is known only to God.
-
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
-
One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.
-
It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
-
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
-
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
-
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
-
A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.
-
As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to work at, it may be right to let them make lace and cut jewels; but as long as there are any who have no blankets for their beds, and no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanket-making and tailoring we must set people to work at, not lace.
-
No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.
-
But if, indeed, there be a nobler life in us than in these strangely moving atoms; if, indeed, there is an eternal difference between the fire which inhabits them, and that which animates us,--it must be shown, by each of us in his appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in the activity of our hope, not merely by our desire, but our labor, for the time when the dust of the generations of men shall be confirmed for foundations of the gates of the city of God.
-
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.