John Ruskin Quotes
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In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
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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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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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The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.
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It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
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A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
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Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
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Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.
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In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.
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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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Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
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Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
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The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
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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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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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Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
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Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
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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.
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The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
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Unless we perform divine service with every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.
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Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.
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There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall 'inherit the earth.' Neither covetous men, nor the grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess.
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Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
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The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.