John Ruskin Quotes
-
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection.
-
An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men.
-
Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.
-
It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.
-
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.
-
There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.
-
The Spirit power begins in directing the Animal power to other than egoistic ends.
-
If you do not wish for His kingdom do not pray for it. But if you do you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it.
-
Obey something, and you will have a chance to learn what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying the devil and all his invited friends.
-
God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where he wishes us to be employed. He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough and sense enough for what he wants us to do.
-
We are only advancing in life, whose hearts are getting softer, our blood warmer, our brains quicker, and our spirits entering into living peace.
-
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.
-
All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.
-
In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.
-
The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.
-
I've seen the Rhine with younger wave, O'er every obstacle to rave. I see the Rhine in his native wild Is still a mighty mountain child.
-
Don't just look at buildings ... watch them.
-
The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.
-
The constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts, and to strengthen them for the help of others.
-
When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera... and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.
-
At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them.
-
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.
-
Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.
-
Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.