John Ruskin Quotes

When men are rightly occupied their amusement grows out of their work as the color-petals out of a fruitful flower.
John Ruskin
When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin
The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.
John Ruskin
Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall at last unveil.
John Ruskin
God gives us always strength enough and sense enough for everything He wants us to do.
John Ruskin
Sometimes gentle sometimes capricious sometimes awful never the same for two moments together almost human in its passions almost spiritual in its tenderness almost Divine in its infinity.
John Ruskin
Shadows are in reality when the sun is shining the most conspicuous thing in a landscape next to the highest lights.
John Ruskin
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
When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.
John Ruskin
When men are rightfully occupied then their amusement grows out of their work as the color petals out of a fruitful garden.
John Ruskin
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.
John Ruskin
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 Ruskin
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
John Ruskin
Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty.
John Ruskin
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 Ruskin
Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall at last unveil.
John Ruskin
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
John Ruskin
Endurance is nobler than strength and patience than beauty.
John Ruskin
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
John Ruskin
No one can do me any good by loving me I have more love than I need or could do any good with but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.
John Ruskin
When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin
I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility.
John Ruskin
When men are rightly occupied their amusement grows out of their work as the color-petals out of a fruitful flower.
John Ruskin
I know well that happiness is in little things.
John Ruskin
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
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 Ruskin
There is no wealth but life.
John Ruskin
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
John Ruskin
God gives us always strength enough and sense enough for everything He wants us to do.
John Ruskin
Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of man in strong health as color to his cheek and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air unwholesome food improperly severe labor or erring habits of life.
John Ruskin
There is hardly anything in the world that some man can't make a little worse and sell a little cheaper and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
John Ruskin
Sunshine is delicious rain is refreshing wind braces us snow is exhilarating there is no such thing as bad weather only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
If a book is worth reading it is worth buying.
John Ruskin
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless peacocks and lilies for instance.
John Ruskin
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless peacocks and lilies for instance.
John Ruskin
The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.
John Ruskin
Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.
John Ruskin
No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
John Ruskin
All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
John Ruskin
God alone can finish.
John Ruskin
One of the major obstacles impeding any positive future change in our lives is that we are too busy with our current work or activity. Levi quit his tax-work, Peter stopped fishing at lake, Paul ceased being a priest. They all left their jobs because they thought it was necessary.
John Ruskin
It is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings; the noble form of the forest aisles, and the subdued light which penetrates their entangled boughs, combine to add to the impression; and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species.
John Ruskin
Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one shape.
John Ruskin
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
John Ruskin
Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists
John Ruskin
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
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and what it saw in a plain way. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion--all in one.
John Ruskin
To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge must always be right. Yet wherever pride has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful to us, we shall perish in like manner.
John Ruskin
And whether consciously or not, you must be in many a heart enthroned: queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter of womanhood.
John Ruskin
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
I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
John Ruskin
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
So far, therefore, as the science of exchange relates to the advantage of one of the exchanging persons only, it is founded on the ignorance or incapacity of the opposite person. . . . It is therefore a science founded on nescience. . . . This science, alone of sciences, must, by all available means, promulgate and prolong its opposite nescience. . . . It is therefore peculiarly and alone science of darkness.
John Ruskin
Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
John Ruskin
No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.
John Ruskin
Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures
John Ruskin
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
John Ruskin
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.
John Ruskin