Top 100 John Ruskin Quotes
#1. As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.
John Ruskin
#2. 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.
John Ruskin
#3. PAINT the leaves as they grow! If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world,' John Ruskin
John Ruskin
#4. All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.
John Ruskin
#5. The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form.
John Ruskin
#6. The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.
John Ruskin
#7. Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing, which if you destroy, you make yourself cold and dull.
John Ruskin
#8. A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
John Ruskin
#9. There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.
John Ruskin
#10. Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
John Ruskin
#11. Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.
John Ruskin
#12. We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.
John Ruskin
#13. I know well that happiness is in little things.
John Ruskin
#14. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it.
John Ruskin
#15. The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
John Ruskin
#16. Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
John Ruskin
#17. You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required
and content that He should indeed require no more of you
than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.
John Ruskin
#18. It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.
John Ruskin
#19. Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.
John Ruskin
#20. Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
John Ruskin
#21. Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge
John Ruskin
#22. Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.
John Ruskin
#23. Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
John Ruskin
#24. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!
John Ruskin
#25. All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
John Ruskin
#26. There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
John Ruskin
#27. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.
John Ruskin
#28. Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.
John Ruskin
#29. All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.
John Ruskin
#30. You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.
John Ruskin
#31. The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
John Ruskin
#32. Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
John Ruskin
#33. The art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.
John Ruskin
#34. There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.
John Ruskin
#35. At least be sure you go to the author to find his meaning, not to find yours.
John Ruskin
#36. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
John Ruskin
#37. Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.
John Ruskin
#38. As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite
variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite
energy. It is the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.
John Ruskin
#39. The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.
John Ruskin
#40. The wisest men are wise to the full in death.
John Ruskin
#41. There is no solemnity so deep, to a right-thinking creature, as that of dawn.
John Ruskin
#42. The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
John Ruskin
#43. I've seen the Rhine with younger wave, O'er every obstacle to rave. I see the Rhine in his native wild Is still a mighty mountain child.
John Ruskin
#44. The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.
John Ruskin
#45. This is the true nature of home - it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.
John Ruskin
#46. It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
John Ruskin
#47. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
John Ruskin
#48. A man never stood so tall as when he stooped to help a child.
John Ruskin
#49. 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.
John Ruskin
#50. The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
John Ruskin
#51. I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing ...
John Ruskin
#52. No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.
John Ruskin
#53. When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera ... and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.
John Ruskin
#54. There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.
John Ruskin
#55. 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.
John Ruskin
#57. I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
John Ruskin
#58. The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.
John Ruskin
#59. Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.
John Ruskin
#60. 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.
John Ruskin
#61. Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.
John Ruskin
#62. The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
John Ruskin
#63. Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.
John Ruskin
#64. 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.
John Ruskin
#65. Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
#66. Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
John Ruskin
#67. Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
John Ruskin
#68. Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.
John Ruskin
#69. Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.
John Ruskin
#70. The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.
John Ruskin
#71. To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
John Ruskin
#72. It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
John Ruskin
#73. So then, men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object.
John Ruskin
#74. There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree.
John Ruskin
#76. That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.
John Ruskin
#77. The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.
John Ruskin
#78. The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.
John Ruskin
#79. Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.
John Ruskin
#80. Human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now Men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or were ever slugs, being practically no matter.
John Ruskin
#81. You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.
John Ruskin
#82. Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it.
John Ruskin
#83. It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me the most to learn, and which was to my childish mind the most repulsive - Psalm 119 - has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God.
John Ruskin
#84. It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
John Ruskin
#85. We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.
John Ruskin
#86. In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.
John Ruskin
#87. There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.
John Ruskin
#88. There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.
John Ruskin
#89. Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.
John Ruskin
#90. In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
John Ruskin
#91. Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.
John Ruskin
#92. No nation can last which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart.
John Ruskin
#93. People cannot live by lending money to one another.
John Ruskin
#94. When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.
John Ruskin
#95. In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.
John Ruskin
#96. Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
John Ruskin
#97. The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.
John Ruskin
#98. Whether we force the man's property from him by pinching his stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically; morally, none whatsoever.
John Ruskin
#99. Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel- pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternityof nothing wasthe deadliest.
John Ruskin
#100. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
John Ruskin
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