John Ruskin Quotes
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The word 'Blue' does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not a man left on the face of the earth.
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The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
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Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.
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A book worth reading is worth buying.
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Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
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Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent.
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All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
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Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
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One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.
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I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
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Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.
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Like other beautiful things in this world, its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.
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You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
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The object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy them.
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It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
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Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.
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It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
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Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes no places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition.
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Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
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He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
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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.
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Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.
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All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
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A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.