John Ruskin Quotes
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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.
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Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
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It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.
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I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing.
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Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers.
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In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.
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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.
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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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The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.
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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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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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The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.
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Never has interest in art been so high, and never has quality been so low.
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The Spirit power begins in directing the Animal power to other than egoistic ends.
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The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.
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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.
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The wisest men are wise to the full in death.
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Don't just look at buildings ... watch them.
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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.
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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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Greatness is the aggregation of minuteness; nor can its sublimity be felt truthfully by any mind unaccustomed to the affectionate watching of what is least.
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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.
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The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.
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Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.