John Ruskin Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
-
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.
-
The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.
-
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.
-
If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.
-
In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
-
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.
-
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
-
Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
-
Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
-
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
-
The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.
-
I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.
-
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
-
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.