John Ruskin Quotes
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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.
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It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
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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.
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It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
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It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
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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.
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It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
[Labor]
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It is shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never hope to hear.
[Poetry]
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It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.
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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.
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It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
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It will be found that they are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men, that most love change.
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Labor without joy is base. Labor without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labor is base. Joy without labor is base.
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Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
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Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
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Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
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Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
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Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.
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Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshiped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.
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Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
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