Explore Quotes by John Ruskin

The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.

No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

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.

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.

Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge

The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

No amount of pay ever made a good soldier, a good teacher, a good artist, or a good workman.

I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.

Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves ... also Makes Them Most _x000D_ Serviceable to Others

Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.

I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

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 with what we spend on our horses?

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

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.