John Ruskin Quotes
-
Ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.
-
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 advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.
-
You cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath as a narcissus will if you do not give her air enough; she might fall and defile her head in dust if you leave her without help at some moments in her life; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her own fair form and way if she take any.
-
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.
-
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
-
Genius is only a superior power of seeing.
-
I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.
-
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin.
-
A man is one whose body has been trained to be the ready servant of his mind; whose passions are trained to be the servants of his will; who enjoys the beautiful, loves truth, hates wrong, loves to do good, and respects others as himself.
-
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.
-
It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.
-
God shows us in Himself, strange as it may seem, not only authoritative perfection, but even the perfection of obedience--an obedience to His own laws; and in the cumbrous movement of those unwieldiest of his creatures we are reminded, even in His divine essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the human creature "that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.
-
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.
-
Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
-
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
-
The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
-
Which of us is to do the hard and dirty work for the restand for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?
-
Absolute and entire ugliness is rare.
-
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
-
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.
-
When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts.
-
Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.
-
The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.