Top 450 John Ruskin Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree not of a cloud.”

— John Ruskin

352. “Now observe; if the artist does not understand the sacredness of the truth of Impression, and supposes that, once quitting hold of his first thought, he may by Philosophy compose something prettier than he saw and mightier than he felt, it is all over with him. Every such attempt at composition will be utterly abortive, and end in something that is neither true nor fanciful; something geographically useless, and intellectually absurd.”

— John Ruskin

353. “How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.”

— John Ruskin

354. “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.”

— John Ruskin

355. “The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.”

— John Ruskin

356. “It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.”

— John Ruskin

357. “Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.”

— John Ruskin

358. “Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.”

— John Ruskin

359. “In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.”

— John Ruskin

360. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

362. “Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.”

— John Ruskin

363. “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.”

— John Ruskin

364. “Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.”

— John Ruskin

365. “To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.”

— John Ruskin

366. “It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.”

— John Ruskin

367. “Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.”

— John Ruskin

368. “You cannot get anything out of nature or from God by gambling; only out of your neighbor.”

— John Ruskin

369. “When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work.”

— John Ruskin

370. “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

371. “You may sell your work, but not your soul.”

— John Ruskin

372. “What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant well-being, and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money.”

— John Ruskin

373. “The only way to understand the difficult parts of the Bible is first to read and obey the easy ones.”

— John Ruskin

374. “In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.”

— John Ruskin

375. “Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.”

— John Ruskin

376. “Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.”

— John Ruskin

377. “Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.”

— John Ruskin

378. “No amount of pay ever made a good soldier, a good teacher, a good artist, or a good workman.”

— John Ruskin

379. “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

380. “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.”

— John Ruskin

381. “The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.”

— John Ruskin

382. “In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.”

— John Ruskin

383. “Butforme, theAlps and their peoplewerealikebeautiful in their snow, and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds.”

— John Ruskin

384. “There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.”

— John Ruskin

385. “Order and system are nobler things than power.”

— John Ruskin

386. “Obey something, and you will have a chance to learn what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying the devil and all his invited friends.”

— John Ruskin

387. “Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble finger, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain, – which it is the pride of utmost age to recover.”

— John Ruskin

388. “A splendour of miscellaneous spirits.”

— John Ruskin

389. “To be taught to read – what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak – but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think – nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.”

— John Ruskin

390. “One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right.”

— John Ruskin

391. “If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.”

— John Ruskin

392. “There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.”

— John Ruskin

393. “You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required – and content that He should indeed require no more of you – than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.”

— John Ruskin

394. “Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.”

— John Ruskin

395. “What is really desired, under the name of riches, is, essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense, the power of obtaining for own own advantage the labour of servant, tradesman, and artist; in wider sense, authority of directing large masses of the nation to various ends.”

— John Ruskin

396. “It is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world.”

— John Ruskin

397. “Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, – strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.”

— John Ruskin

398. “Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.”

— John Ruskin

399. “Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin