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John Ruskin Quotes

Art critic

John Ruskin was an influential British art critic, writer, and social critic. Known for his profound insights into art, architecture, and social issues, he had a significant impact on the aesthetics and culture of the Victorian era.

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All Men Ifs Art Literature May Humans People Doe Firsts Thinking Architecture Heart World Giving Littles Children Knows Mean Political Done

Famous John Ruskin Quotes

“If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.”

Ifs Virtue Design Building Vices Antiquity

Book:Modern Painters

Source: Modern Painters

“Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.”

Ifs Love Children Doe Past Parent Natural Recollection

Author:John Ruskin

“If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.”

Ifs Years Long Done Success Tree Great Things Ease Gathering Blossoming

Author:John Ruskin

“You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.”

Ifs Kind May Doe Girl Grows Boys Pieces Rocks Flower Shapes Cute Hammers Bronze Girly Chisels

Book:Sesame and Lillies: Three Lectures

Source: Sesame and Lillies: Three Lectures

“But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work.”

Ifs Doe Political Fighting Politics Winning Nations Differences Land Kings Army Profit Wide Treasure Governors Captains

Book:Selections and Essays

Source: Selections and Essays

“If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.”

Ifs Book Reading Buying Worth Reading Buying Books

Book:The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

Source: The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

“The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.”

Ifs Men Looks May Doe Art Color He Man Red Paint Rounds Intellect Gray Great Power Peaches

Author:John Ruskin

“Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves trees enough, and everyone is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.”

Source: Pt. 6-9 of leaf beauty. of cloud beauty. of ideas of relation

“My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,- if I could have been invisible, all the better. . . to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, - happier if it needed no help of mine, - this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.”

Source: England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste

“It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.”

Ifs Giving Long Together Time Effort Failing Objects Failure Long Time Appeals Faculty Delicate Incapable Limbs Fatigue Jaded Time Together

Book:Modern Painters: pt. 4. Of many things

Source: Modern Painters: pt. 4. Of many things

“Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.”

Ifs Giving Littles Cities Give Me Paint Dust Coal Mud Pits Crossings Luminous Gravel Whitening

Book:The Elements of Drawing

Source: The Elements of Drawing

“Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.”

Ifs Book Sweet Bread Honey Good Book Flour

Book:The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

Source: The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings

“It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend.”

Ifs Inspirational Opportunity Kindness Safe True Words Omitting

Author:John Ruskin

“I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.”

Ifs Knows Want Should Firsts Use Science Wish Sound Green Greek Leafs Nomenclature Green Leaves

Book:The Seven Lamps of Architecture: Also, Lectures on Architecture and Painting; The Study of Architecture; Sesame and Lilies; Unto this Last; The Queen of the Air; The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century

Source: The Seven Lamps of Architecture: Also, Lectures on Architecture and Painting; The Study of Architecture; Sesame and Lilies; Unto this Last; The Queen of the Air; The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century

“There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.”

Ifs Looks Soul Light Eye Humanity Animal Mystery Strange Creatures Claims Command Flash Fellowship Gleam

Book:Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy, the Old and New Societies of Painters in Water Colours, the Society of British Artists and the French Exhibition

Source: Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy, the Old and New Societies of Painters in Water Colours, the Society of British Artists and the French Exhibition

“Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.”

Ifs Language Loses Half Dependent

Book:Pt. 1-2. of general principles and of truth

Source: Pt. 1-2. of general principles and of truth

“If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.”