John Ruskin Quotes
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God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.
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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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All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of 'virtue' is that straightness of back.
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The man who says to one, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.
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The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
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The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.
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Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
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He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
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It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things by help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.
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Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.
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Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labourwhich its possessor will take in exchange for it.
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It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.
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Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
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The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.
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There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
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Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
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Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.
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There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.
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The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.
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Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.
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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.
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Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel- pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternityof nothing wasthe deadliest.
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Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches.
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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.