Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
John RuskinThe secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle
John RuskinThat which is required in order to the attainment of accurate conclusions respecting the essence of the Beautiful is nothing morethan earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to our impressions of it.
John RuskinThe greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John RuskinIt is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.
John RuskinIf you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
John RuskinNearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
John RuskinAnother of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station... There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads... Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work.
John RuskinThe relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.
John RuskinThe names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; .in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.
John RuskinCookery 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 RuskinAll 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 RuskinTo speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty
John RuskinThe man who says to one, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.
John RuskinThe proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.
John RuskinThe very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.
John RuskinThere is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.
John RuskinEvery human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.
John RuskinA gentleman's first characteristic is that fineness of structure in the body which renders it capable of the most delicate sensation; and of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies; one may say simply "fineness of nature.
John RuskinOne of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.
John RuskinIt is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.
John RuskinThe history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.
John RuskinI have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
John RuskinHe is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
John RuskinA man is one whose body has been trained to be the ready servant of his mind; whose passions are trained to be the servants of his will; who enjoys the beautiful, loves truth, hates wrong, loves to do good, and respects others as himself.
John RuskinThe virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.
John RuskinTo 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.
John RuskinTo yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.
John RuskinThe Bible is the one Book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
John RuskinThe actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.
John Ruskin