John Ruskin Quotes
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Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.
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To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.
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Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves trees enough, and everyone is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.
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To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty.
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To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.
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There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.
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To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.
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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.
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Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.
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It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
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We are only advancing in life, whose hearts are getting softer, our blood warmer, our brains quicker, and our spirits entering into living peace.
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On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.
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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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I had no companions to quarrel with, nobody to assist, and nobody to thank... the evil consequence of all this was not, however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish or non affectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with a violence utterly rampant and unmanageable.
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Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.
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I desire ... to leave this one great fact clearly stated. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.
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You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
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The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its dependency of language or expression.
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He who is not actively kind is cruel!
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The sculptor must paint with his chisel; half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.
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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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An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.
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All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.
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He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.