John Ruskin Quotes
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Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.
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No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
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Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.
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Genius is only a superior power of seeing.
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The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
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In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
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The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
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There is no solemnity so deep, to a right-thinking creature, as that of dawn.
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Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
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There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
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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.
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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.
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One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.
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Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
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Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
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Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.
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It was stated, . . . that 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.
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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.
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I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
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Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.
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It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
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There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
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Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.
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When we build, let us think that we build for ever.