John Ruskin Quotes
-
When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.
-
When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ... Our God is a house – hold God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling.
-
Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.
-
There is nothing so great or so goodly in creation, but that it is a mean symbol of the gospel of Christ, and of the things He has prepared for them that love Him.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.
-
It is, indeed, right that we should look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the day of God; but not that we should check any human effort by anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future ages.
-
It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend.
-
Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
-
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
-
All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
-
The repose necessary to all beauty is repose, not of inanition, nor of luxury, nor of irresolution, but the repose of magnificent energy and being; in action, the calmness of trust and determination; in rest, the consciousness of duty accomplished and of victory won; and this repose and this felicity can take place as well in the midst of trial and tempest, as beside the waters of comfort.
-
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
-
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
-
Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
-
You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.
-
One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.
-
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
-
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.
-
There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.
-
A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.
-
The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
-
The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.