Top 450 John Ruskin Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up.”

— John Ruskin

253. “There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.”

— John Ruskin

254. “You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.”

— John Ruskin

255. “The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its dependency of language or expression.”

— John Ruskin

256. “You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.”

— John Ruskin

257. “A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.”

— John Ruskin

258. “A man never stood so tall as when he stooped to help a child.”

— John Ruskin

259. “The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.”

— John Ruskin

260. “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

261. “It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.”

— John Ruskin

262. “It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.”

— John Ruskin

263. “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

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

— John Ruskin

265. “No day is without its innocent hope.”

— John Ruskin

266. “If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God’s work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.”

— John Ruskin

267. “I used to lie down on the grass and draw the blades as they grew – until every square foot of meadow, or mossy bank, became a possession to me.”

— John Ruskin

268. “Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.”

— John Ruskin

269. “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

270. “The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.”

— John Ruskin

271. “The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.”

— John Ruskin

272. “Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.”

— John Ruskin

273. “God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.”

— John Ruskin

274. “If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.”

— John Ruskin

275. “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.”

— John Ruskin

276. “There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.”

— John Ruskin

277. “Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.”

— John Ruskin

278. “Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.”

— John Ruskin

279. “As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary; a wild flower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by bread only.”

— John Ruskin

280. “One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.”

— John Ruskin

281. “The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.”

— John Ruskin

282. “He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.”

— John Ruskin

283. “True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.”

— John Ruskin

284. “There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.”

— John Ruskin

285. “There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

287. “You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.”

— John Ruskin

288. “Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.”

— John Ruskin

289. “Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.”

— John Ruskin

290. “A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd’s staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.”

— John Ruskin

291. “Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.”

— John Ruskin

292. “Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.”

— John Ruskin

293. “I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing...”

— John Ruskin

294. “Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.”

— John Ruskin

295. “There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.”

— John Ruskin

296. “Civilization is the making of civil persons.”

— John Ruskin

297. “No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.”

— John Ruskin

298. “The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.”

— John Ruskin

299. “They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.”

— John Ruskin

300. “If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.”

— John Ruskin