Famous Quotes

Quotes by John Ruskin

• A great thing can only be done by a great person and they do it without effort.
• A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
• All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.
• All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
• All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
• An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
• Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
• Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
• Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
• Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
• Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
• Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.
• Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
• Every great person is always being helped by everybody for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
• Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
• Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
• Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
• He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.
• How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
• I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
• In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
• In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
• It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.
• It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
• It is written on the arched sky it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
• It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
• Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.
• Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
• Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions and take that of laborers Unions.
• Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.