John Ruskin Quotes
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Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.
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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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To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.
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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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When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
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You may sell your work, but not your soul.
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Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.
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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.
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Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
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God alone can finish.
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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.
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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.
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People cannot live by lending money to one another.
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Color is, in brief terms, the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth; and again, with its fruits; also, with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man.
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Architecture is the work of nations.
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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.
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The best work never was and never will be done for money.
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When God shuts a door, He opens a window.
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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.
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Do justice to your brother, and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him because you don't love him, and you will come to hate him.
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To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.
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If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.
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Society has sacrificed its virtues to the Goddess of Getting Along.
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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.