John Ruskin Quotes
-
I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
-
He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
-
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
-
There is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour, in which nature does not exhibit color which no mortal effort can imitate or approach. For all our artificial pigments are, even when seen under the same circumstances, dead and lightless beside her living color; nature exhibits her hues under an intensity of sunlight which trebles their brilliancy.
-
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
-
In my house there is no attempt whatever to secure harmonies of colour, or form, or furniture.... I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon the sensual qualities of form or colour-when I want them I take them either from the sky or from the fields.
-
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
-
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
-
The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.
-
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible..... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.
-
And besides; the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question remains inexorable, Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest, and for what pay?
-
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
-
Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.
-
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
-
All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.
-
It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.
-
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
-
You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.
-
If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.
-
It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.
-
Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close: — then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others — some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves.