John Ruskin Quotes
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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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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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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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Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
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Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.
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The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
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How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
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In general, when the imagination is at all noble, it is irresistible, and therefore those who can at all resist it ought to resist it. Be a plain topographer if you possibly can; if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet.
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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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You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.
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It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.
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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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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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Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.
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Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
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There is no solemnity so deep, to a right-thinking creature, as that of dawn.
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It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.
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The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.
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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.
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It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.
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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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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.
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There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
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Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.