John Ruskin Quotes

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.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.

Living without an aim, is like sailing without a compass.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.

Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

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!

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

The enormous influence of novelty--the way in which it quickens observations, sharpens sensations, and exalts sentiment--is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous.

That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green.

Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.

The best work never was and never will be done for money.

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.

Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.

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.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

The best thing in life aren't things.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching.

The spirit needs several sorts of food of which knowledge is only one.

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.

It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things by help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.

There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

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.

To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death.

A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.

Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end.

Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.

Not without design does God write the music of our lives.

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.

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.

It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

... the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a gift also to his race forever.

When we build ... let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think ... that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!

Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.

A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.

I had no companions to quarrel with, nobody to assist, and nobody to thank... the evil consequence of all this was not, however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish or non affectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with a violence utterly rampant and unmanageable.