Top 450 John Ruskin Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

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

— John Ruskin

253. “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

254. “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

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

257. “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

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

260. “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

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

— John Ruskin

262. “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

263. “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

264. “There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.”

— John Ruskin

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.”

— John Ruskin

270. “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

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

— John Ruskin

272. “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

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

275. “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

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

— John Ruskin

277. “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

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

280. “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

281. “He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.”

— John Ruskin

282. “No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.”

— John Ruskin

283. “When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.”

— John Ruskin

284. “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

285. “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

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

288. “There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

290. “Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.”

— John Ruskin

291. “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

292. “The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

294. “Absolute and entire ugliness is rare.”

— John Ruskin

295. “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.”

— John Ruskin

296. “There is nothing so great or so goodly in creation, but that it is a mean symbol of the gospel of Christ, and of the things He has prepared for them that love Him.”

— John Ruskin

297. “But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.”

— John Ruskin

298. “No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

300. “Imperfections have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be effort, and the law of human judgment mercy.”

— John Ruskin