John Ruskin Quotes
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The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.
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People cannot live by lending money to one another.
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It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend.
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Order and system are nobler things than power.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.
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Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.
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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.
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That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin.
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We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
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Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
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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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Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
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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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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.
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Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.
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Absolute and entire ugliness is rare.
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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.
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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.