"Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God."
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Quote collection
John Ruskin quotes (page 24 of 31)
606 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things."
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"It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things by help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight."
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"There is no music in a “rest” that I know of, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody."
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"Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury."
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"It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one."
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"As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it."
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"The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us."
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"I had no companions to quarrel with, nobody to assist, and nobody to thank... the evil consequence of all this was not, however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish or non affectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with a violence utterly rampant and unmanageable."
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"In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble."
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"All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way."
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"That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green."
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"Morality does not depend on religion."
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"If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours."
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"If you do not wish for His kingdom do not pray for it. But if you do you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it."
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"I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)"
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"That which is required in order to the attainment of accurate conclusions respecting the essence of the Beautiful is nothing morethan earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to our impressions of it."
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"Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel- pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternityof nothing wasthe deadliest."
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"The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households."
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"... the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a gift also to his race forever."
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