John Ruskin Quotes
-
Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
-
Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.
-
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
-
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
-
If it is the love of that which your work represents – if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you – if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty, and human soul that moves you – if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fullness thereof.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.
-
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
-
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
-
A book worth reading is worth buying.
-
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.
-
The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.
-
Which of us is to do the hard and dirty work for the restand for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?
-
It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.
-
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.
-
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.
-
The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you.
-
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
-
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.
-
We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.