Top 617 Quotes & Sayings by John Ruskin - Page 5

The artist's business is to feel, although he may think a little sometimes... when he has nothing better to do.

Order and system are nobler things than power.

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.

Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.

One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.

The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of divine attributes, and from nothing but that which is so, is the most glorious of all that can be demonstrated of human nature; it not only sets a great gulf of specific separation between us and the lower animals, but it seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious, with the Being whose darkened manifestations we here feebly and unthinkingly delight in.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.

Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.

He who is not actively kind is cruel!

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle

Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.

You cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath as a narcissus will if you do not give her air enough; she might fall and defile her head in dust if you leave her without help at some moments in her life; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her own fair form and way if she take any.

At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them.

Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.

It 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.

The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance.

I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out.

Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.

Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.

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.

Always stand by form against force.

In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.

The constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts, and to strengthen them for the help of others.

The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.

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.

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.

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.

Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.

If you want to work for the kingdom of God, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.

No girl who is well bred, 'kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart.

When God shuts a door, He opens a window.

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.

Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.

See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.

You may sell your work, but not your soul.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.

To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.

The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.

In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.

Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.

Whenever I did anything wrong, stupid or hard-hearted, and I have done many things that were all three, my mother always said "it is because you were too much indulged."

Architecture is the work of nations

The 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.

Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

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.

Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.

Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.

The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.

What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms and spices... It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat.

There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.