John Ruskin Quotes
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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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The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
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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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Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
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An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
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Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
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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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I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
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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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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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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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It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
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You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
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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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Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
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As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to work at, it may be right to let them make lace and cut jewels; but as long as there are any who have no blankets for their beds, and no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanket-making and tailoring we must set people to work at, not lace.
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To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
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It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.
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Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.
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And besides; the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question remains inexorable, Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest, and for what pay?
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No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.
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It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.
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To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.
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All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.