John Ruskin Quotes
-
It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
-
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
-
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
-
It ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country, because he has deserved well of his country.
-
Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.
-
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
-
Levi's station in life was the receipt of custom; and Peter's, the shore of Galilee; and Paul's, the antechambers of the High- Priest,- which 'station in life' each had to leave, with brief notice.
-
For men to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.
-
No one can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.
-
The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.
-
In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.
-
See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
-
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
-
Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
-
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.
-
... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)
-
In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.
-
He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.
-
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
-
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.
-
Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it. Your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night.
-
Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
-
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.
-
One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.