john ruskin quotes
Art quotes search by Author:

Join thousands of others and get the twice-weekly art letter.
Subscription is free.

Absolutely free, no strings. Sign up to the twice-weekly letter and join our art community.

art quotes

john ruskin Quotes



Quotes by john ruskin - (92 quotes)

John Ruskin - From the Ability category:

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Ambition category:

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Architecture category:

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can be only a builder. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Architecture category:

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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Art category:

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Art category:

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Artists category:

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Beauty category:

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Beauty category:

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Books category:

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Books category:

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Business category:

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

John Ruskin - From the Children category:

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing... should be taught to every child just as writing is... (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Colour category:

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Colour category:

Blue color is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Colour category:

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Colour category:

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Commerce category:

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Competition category:

Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Construction category:

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Construction category:

When we build, let us think that we build for ever. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Courage category:

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Criticism category:

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything toward diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Critics category:

The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Culture category:

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Culture category:

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Deception category:

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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Deception category:

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Discipline category:

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Dissatisfaction category:

Do not think of your faults, still less of others' 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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Education category:

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy them; not merely be industrious, but love industry; not merely learn, but love knowledge; not merely be pure, but love purity; not merely be just, but hunger and thirst after justice. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Effort category:

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Ego category:

When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Expression category:

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Form category:

Always stand by form against force. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Freedom category:

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Goodness category:

All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Greatness category:

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)

John Ruskin - From the Greatness category:

All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Greatness category:

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Greatness category:

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Happiness category:

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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Humility category:

I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Importance category:

I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing... (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Impossibilities category:

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Integrity category:

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Journey category:

There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Joy category:

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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Knowledge category:

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Light category:

-Elements of Drawing...
Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel-pit, a little whitening, and some coal dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Love category:

Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Masters category:

When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Masters category:

-on the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto...
It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Meaning category:

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Money category:

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Music category:

Music, when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Nature category:

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)

John Ruskin - From the Nature category:

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Obsession category:

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

John Ruskin - From the Opposites category:

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)

John Ruskin - From the Patience category:

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience nobler than beauty. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Perfection category:

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

John Ruskin - From the Perfection category:

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Plein-Air category:

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Poetry category:

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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Possessions category:

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Power category:

There is a satisfactory and available power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all persons have the power of learning French, Latin or arithmetic, in a decent and useful degree. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Prosperity category:

There is no wealth but life. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Quality category:

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Quality category:

Never has interest in art been so high, and never has quality been so low. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Questions category:

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this: was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it? (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Reality category:

There are no such things as flowers; there are only gladdened leaves. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Religion category:

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Rewards category:

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Rewards category:

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Seeing category:

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Seeing category:

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)

John Ruskin - From the Seeing category:

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Shock category:

Imaginary evils soon become real by indulging our reflections on them. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Silence category:

It is one's restraint that is honorable to a person, not one's liberty. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Skill category:

Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Skill category:

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Taste category:

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Teaching category:

I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Teaching category:

Teaching is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Time category:

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Travel category:

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Vanity category:

The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Words category:

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)

John Ruskin - From the Work category:

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. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Work category:

Life without work is guilt; work without art is brutality. (John Ruskin)

John Ruskin - From the Work category:

Whether for life or death, do your own work well. (John Ruskin)