John Ruskin Quotes
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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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That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin.
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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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The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
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A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.
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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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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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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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There is no wealth but life.
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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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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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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.
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There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.
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The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
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The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.
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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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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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All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.
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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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Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
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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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We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
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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.