John Ruskin Quotes
-
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.
-
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
-
I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.
-
Trust thou thy Love: if she be proud, is she not sweet? Trust thou thy love: if she be mute, is she not pure? Lay thou thy soul full in her hands, low at her feet- Fail, Sun and Breath!-yet, for thy peace, she shall endure.
-
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
-
Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.
-
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.
-
To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.
-
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.
-
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
-
... the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a gift also to his race forever.
-
He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
-
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
-
Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.
-
No one can do me any good by loving me; I have more love than I need or could do any good with; but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.
-
You may sell your work, but not your soul.
-
Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.
-
The Bible is the one Book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
-
Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.
-
Society has sacrificed its virtues to the Goddess of Getting Along.
-
Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.
-
A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
-
We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.
-
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.