Quotes from John Ruskin

Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting around a polygon is severe work for people in any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.

If we're others-centered, we'll be blessed, but if we're clothed in selfishness, we'll be of limited value to others.

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

If the pleasure of change is too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for the change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change that brought the end of the gothic school.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.

The demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

It is not that the noble nature loves monotony, any more than it loves darkness or pain. But it can bear with it, and receive a high pleasure in the endurance or patience, a pleasure necessary to the well-being of this world; while those who will not submit to the temporary sameness, but rush from one change to another, gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow and weariness over the whole world from which there is no more escape.

I believe the first test of truly a great man is in his humility.

Imperfection is in some sorts essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect: part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom - A third part bud, a third part past, a third part full bloom, - is a type of the life of this world.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression.

The first and absolute condition of the thing's ever becoming saleable is, that we shall make it without wanting to sell it; nay, rather with a determination not to sell it at any price, if once we get hold of it. Try to make your Art popular, cheap –

Overcome by his feelings, the Parisian threw himself upon the ground, exclaiming, in an agony of tears La bonne reine ! la pauvre reine ! Presently he sprang up, exclaiming, Cependant, Monsieur, il faut vous faire voir mon petit chien danser. This contrast, though natural in a Parisian, was unnatural in the nature of things, and therefore injurious.

It is not of the slightest use to economise ; every farthing improperly saved does a shilling's worth of damage ; and that is getting a bargain the wrong way.

Reading is precisely a conversation with men who are both wiser and more interesting than those we might have occasion to meet ourselves. –

What one person has, another cannot have; and that every atom of substance, of whatever kind, used or consumed, is so much human life spent, which, if it issue in the saving present life, or gaining more, is well spent, but if not, is either so much life prevented or so much slain.

The fact is, that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn…The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

It does not cost money only. It costs degradation. You do not merely employ these people. You also tread upon them.

Shakespeare has no heroes. He only has heroines.

All building, therefore, shows man either as gathering or governing: and the secrets of his success are his knowing what to gather, and how to rule.

And it may be matter of encouragement in this respect, though one also of regret, to observe how much oftener man destroys natural sublimity, than nature crushes human power. It does not need much to humiliate a mountain.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated

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.

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

There is no wealth but life