John Ruskin Quotes
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Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.
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A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.
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It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.
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Society has sacrificed its virtues to the Goddess of Getting Along.
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Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
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There is a certain period of the soul-culture when it begins to interfere with some of characters of typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring of the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its way out to heaven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel; and there is, in this indication of subduing the mortal by the immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range than that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul than of, the fair and ruddy countenance of David.
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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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Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.
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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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Life is a magic vase filled to the brim, so made that you cannot dip from it nor draw from it; but it overflows into the hand that drops treasures into it. Drop in malice and it overflows hate; drop in charity and it overflows love.
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Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the time, and not be discouraged at the rests. If we say sadly to ourselves, "There is no music in a rest," let us not forget " there is the making of music in it." The making of music is often a slow and painful process in this life. How patiently God works to teach us! How long He waits for us to learn the lesson!
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True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.
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You may sell your work, but not your soul.
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God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.
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He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
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Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
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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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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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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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The best work never was and never will be done for money.
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In our whole life melody the music is broken off here and there by rests, and we foolishly think we have come to the end of time. God sends a time of forced leisure, a time of sickness and disappointed plans, and makes a sudden pause in the hymns of our lives, and we lament that our voice must be silent and our part missing in the music which ever goes up to the ear of our Creator. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the time and not be dismayed at the rests. If we look up, God will beat the time for us.
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What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
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No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
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If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.