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One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said Let him touch it. So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.

John Ruskin

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John Ruskin
Age: 80 †
Born: 1819
Born: February 8
Died: 1900
Died: January 20
Aesthetician
Architect
Art Critic
Art Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Kata Phusin
Rŏsŭkʻin
J. Ruskin
John Rosukin
Jon Rasukin
Dzhon Rëskin
Ruskin
Away
Touched
Mother
Evening
Merrily
Wanted
Touch
Boiling
Firsts
Lessons
Libertarianism
First
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Nurse
Would
Arms
Tea
Liberty
Libertarian
Taken
Lesson

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Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.
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In my house there is no attempt whatever to secure harmonies of colour, or form, or furniture.... I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon the sensual qualities of form or colour-when I want them I take them either from the sky or from the fields.
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Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
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Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
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The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.
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Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.
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Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.
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No day is without its innocent hope.
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Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
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Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
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Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.
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Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.
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The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.
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I desire ... to leave this one great fact clearly stated. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.
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You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil buy it, by compromise with evil.
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The sculptor must paint with his chisel half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.
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Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.
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All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
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I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.
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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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