John Ruskin Quotes
-
The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A book worth reading is worth buying.
-
Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
-
The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.
-
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.
-
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
-
Hope- the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached here after.
-
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
-
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
-
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.
-
The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.
-
The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
-
It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.
-
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.