John Ruskin Quotes
-
Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.
-
Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.
-
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.
-
God gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault.
-
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
-
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.
-
Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.
-
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
-
When God shuts a door, He opens a window.
-
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
-
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.
-
A man is known to his dog by the smell, to his tailor by the coat, to his friend by the smile; each of these know him, but how little or how much depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man is known only to God.
-
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
-
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.
-
Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
-
Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.
-
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.
-
Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.
-
Architecture is the work of nations.
-
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.
-
So long as we see the stones and joints, and are not deceived as to the points of support in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise than regret the dexterous artifices which compel us to feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in its branches.
-
We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.
-
Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.
-
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.