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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.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.
John Ruskin
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Hope- the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached here after.
John Ruskin
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There is no wealth but life.
John Ruskin
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You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
John Ruskin
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He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
John Ruskin
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The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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The last act crowns the play.
John Ruskin
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Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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People cannot live by lending money to one another.
John Ruskin
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Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
John Ruskin
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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.
John Ruskin
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Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.
John Ruskin
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A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.
John Ruskin
