John Ruskin Quotes
-
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.
-
There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
-
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.
-
It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.
-
We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
-
I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions... Nor has the Church's ardent "desire to depart, and be with Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure.
-
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.
-
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.
-
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
-
"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."
-
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.
-
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.
-
The word 'Blue' does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not a man left on the face of the earth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
-
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.
-
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
-
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
-
The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them.
-
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.