John Ruskin Quotes
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Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
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In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.
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All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
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As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.
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Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.
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It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.
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Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
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He who offers God a second place offers Him no place.
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No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
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I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.
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... A power of obtaining veracity in the representation of material and tangible things, which, within certain limits and conditions, is unimpeachable, has now been placed in the hands of all men, almost without labour. (1853)
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Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.
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There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening Apollo and the sweet Muses of the Light? You enterprised a railroad you blasted its rocks away? And, now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.
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I used to lie down on the grass and draw the blades as they grew - until every square foot of meadow, or mossy bank, became a possession to me.
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Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.
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Courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the mark of a gentleman or a lady; but it becomes vulgar if rude or insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a characteristic of race or fineness of make. A fawn is not vulgar in being timid, nor a crocodile "gentle" because courageous.
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You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
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I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface.
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What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men ... this power ... is in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves.
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Whenever I did anything wrong, stupid or hard-hearted, and I have done many things that were all three, my mother always said "it is because you were too much indulged."
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One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.
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All the best things and treasures of this world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snow-ball, higher and higher, larger and larger, along the Alps of human power.
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The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.
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Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.