Quotes from John Ruskin

If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

The majesty of nature depends upon the force of the human spirit.

For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

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.

The mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

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

I want to speak to you about the treasures hidden in books; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them.

Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.

I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance: 1. Savageness; 2. Changefulness; 3. Naturalism; 4. Grotesqueness; 5. Rigidity; 6. Redundance.

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

Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death: only little men do that.

If some people see angels where others only see empty space, let them paint the angels; only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.

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 to what we spend on our horses?

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.

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.

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.

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.

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.

The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rival ship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

Membaca, berpikir, mencintai dan berdoa, hal-hal inilah yang membuat orang berbahagia.

You may trust to the truth of my sympathy; but you must remember that I am engaged in the investigation of enormous religious and moral questions, in the history of nations; and that your feelings, or my own, or anybody else's, at any particular moment, are of very little interest to me,--not from want of sympathy, but from the small proportion the individuality bears to the whole subject of my enquiry.