John Ruskin Quotes
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To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
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God alone can finish.
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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.
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I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
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Human work must be done thoroughly and honourably because we are now men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter.
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The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.
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You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required – and content that He should indeed require no more of you – than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.
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It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
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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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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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Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.
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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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The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.
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And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security, that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.
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You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
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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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Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
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If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
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When God shuts a door, He opens a window.
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Architecture is the work of nations.
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You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
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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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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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There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.