John Ruskin Quotes
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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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Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.
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Society has sacrificed its virtues to the Goddess of Getting Along.
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Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
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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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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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... 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.
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All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
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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.
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Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.
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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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I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.
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One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.
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To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.
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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.
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Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.
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You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.
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Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.
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You may sell your work, but not your soul.
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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.
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The spirit needs several sorts of food of which knowledge is only one.
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The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; .in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.
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The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves ... also Makes Them Most Serviceable to Others.
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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.