John Ruskin Quotes
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All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.
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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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The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
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There is no wealth but life.
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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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We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
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The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.
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Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
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In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.
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Hope- the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached here after.
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It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else.
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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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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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The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
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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.
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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.
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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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Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.
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Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.
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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.
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Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
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A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.
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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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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.