Top 100 John Ruskin Quotes
#1. PAINT the leaves as they grow! If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world,' John Ruskin
John Ruskin
#2. 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
#3. We are, after all, only trustees of the wealth we possess. Without the community and its resources ... there would be little wealth for anyone.
John Ruskin
#4. 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
#5. It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.
John Ruskin
#6. The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.
John Ruskin
#7. Cookery means ... English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
John Ruskin
#8. All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest, is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye.
John Ruskin
#9. Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
John Ruskin
#10. There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
John Ruskin
#11. Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
John Ruskin
#13. It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.
John Ruskin
#14. We shall be led as much to the street and the cottage as to the temple and the tower; and shall be more interested in buildings raised by feeling,
John Ruskin
#15. Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
John Ruskin
#16. Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.
John Ruskin
#17. It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
John Ruskin
#18. If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.
John Ruskin
#19. He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.
John Ruskin
#20. Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
John Ruskin
#21. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
John Ruskin
#22. Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
John Ruskin
#23. The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
John Ruskin
#25. 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.
John Ruskin
#26. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
John Ruskin
#27. Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.
John Ruskin
#28. We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
John Ruskin
#29. The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.
John Ruskin
#30. Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
John Ruskin
#31. Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?
John Ruskin
#32. He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth they, and they only.
John Ruskin
#33. 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
#34. Color is, in brief terms, the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth; and again, with its fruits; also, with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man.
John Ruskin
#35. Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge
John Ruskin
#36. Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
John Ruskin
#37. 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
#38. What is really desired, under the name of riches, is, essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense, the power of obtaining for own own advantage the labour of servant, tradesman, and artist; in wider sense, authority of directing large masses of the nation to various ends.
John Ruskin
#39. In general, when the imagination is at all noble, it is irresistible, and therefore those who can at all resist it ought to resist it. Be a plain topographer if you possibly can; if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet.
John Ruskin
#40. How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
John Ruskin
#41. Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
John Ruskin
#42. The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so.
John Ruskin
#43. You shall have thousands of gold pieces; - thousands of thousands - millions - mountains of gold: where will you keep them?
John Ruskin
#44. Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.
John Ruskin
#45. Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.
John Ruskin
#46. That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green.
John Ruskin
#47. See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
John Ruskin
#48. You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
John Ruskin
#49. The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.
John Ruskin
#50. Once thoroughly our own knowledge ceases to give us pleasure.
John Ruskin
#51. The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.
John Ruskin
#52. God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it
a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.
John Ruskin
#53. Humanity and Immortality consist neither in reason, nor in love; not in the body, nor in the animation of the heart of it, nor in the thoughts and stirrings of the brain of it;
but in the dedication of them all to Him who will raise them up at the last day.
John Ruskin
#54. 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.
John Ruskin
#55. What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.
John Ruskin
#56. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
John Ruskin
#57. Whether for life or death, do your own work well.
John Ruskin
#58. One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.
John Ruskin
#59. In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.
John Ruskin
#60. Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
John Ruskin
#61. To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.
John Ruskin
#62. God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where he wishes us to be employed. He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough and sense enough for what he wants us to do.
John Ruskin
#63. All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
John Ruskin
#64. Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.
John Ruskin
#65. The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.
John Ruskin
#66. No human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice.
John Ruskin
#67. Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.
John Ruskin
#68. Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.
John Ruskin
#69. Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures
John Ruskin
#70. 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
#71. It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
John Ruskin
#72. All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.
John Ruskin
#73. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#74. If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
John Ruskin
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
John Ruskin
#78. Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.
John Ruskin
#79. A man is known to his dog by the smell, to his tailor by the coat, to his friend by the smile; each of these know him, but how little or how much depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man is known only to God.
John Ruskin
#80. All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.
John Ruskin
#81. 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
#82. What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.
John Ruskin
#83. I know well that happiness is in little things.
John Ruskin
#84. Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.
John Ruskin
#85. I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.
John Ruskin
#86. He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.
John Ruskin
#87. 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
#88. Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.
John Ruskin
#90. The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
John Ruskin
#91. A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.
John Ruskin
#92. Sky is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.
John Ruskin
#93. Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing.
John Ruskin
#94. Let every dawn of the morning be to you as the beginning of life. And let every setting of the sun be to you as its close. Then let everyone of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others; some good strength of knowledge gained for yourself.
John Ruskin
#95. Education ... is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning, ... by praise, but above all
by example.
John Ruskin
#96. There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.
John Ruskin
#97. Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.
John Ruskin
#98. A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
John Ruskin
#99. Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
John Ruskin
#100. Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing, which if you destroy, you make yourself cold and dull.
John Ruskin
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