John Ruskin Quotes
-
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
-
My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
-
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.
-
Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.
-
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
-
Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
-
Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
-
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
-
The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.
-
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
-
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.
-
I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.
-
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.
-
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin.
-
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
-
Architecture is the work of nations.
-
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.
-
The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
-
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.
-
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.
-
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.