John Ruskin Quotes
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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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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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Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.
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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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When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower; when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.
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Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.
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Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.
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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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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.
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Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.
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Order and system are nobler things than power.
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The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.
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So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.
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Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.
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Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
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The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.
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In my house there is no attempt whatever to secure harmonies of colour, or form, or furniture.... I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon the sensual qualities of form or colour-when I want them I take them either from the sky or from the fields.
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You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
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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.
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Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
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No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
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Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.
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To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.
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There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.