"The scholar is early acquainted with every department of the impossible."
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Quote collection
John Ruskin quotes (page 26 of 31)
606 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it. Your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night."
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"To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray, — these are the things that make men happy."
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"Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge"
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"In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children."
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"Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul."
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"Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man."
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"Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people"
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"Work first, and then rest."
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"No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true."
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"Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?"
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"... no human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice."
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"There are many religions, but there is only one morality."
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"Unless we perform divine service with every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all."
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"The Spirit power begins in directing the Animal power to other than egoistic ends."
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"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."
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"However good you may be you have faults; however dull you may be you can find out what some of them are, and however slight they may be you had better make some - not too painful, but patient efforts to get rid of them."
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"God alone can finish."
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"What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men ... this power ... is in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves."
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"God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work."
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