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The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its dependency of language or expression.
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
Language
Dependent
Proportion
Dignity
Praise
Highest
Dependency
Thoughts
Exact
Expression
Composition
Least
Entitled
More quotes by John Ruskin
Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
John Ruskin
Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.
John Ruskin
My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
John Ruskin
If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.
John Ruskin
There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.
John Ruskin
Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.
John Ruskin
Levi's station in life was the receipt of custom and Peter's, the shore of Galilee and Paul's, the antechambers of the High- Priest, which station in life each had to leave, with brief notice.
John Ruskin
In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble and a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base.
John Ruskin
Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect in its own bad way.
John Ruskin
It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.
John Ruskin
[For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.
John Ruskin
Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.
John Ruskin
No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
John Ruskin
Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, the laws of death.
John Ruskin
As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.
John Ruskin
Unless we perform divine service with every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.
John Ruskin
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.
John Ruskin
Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.
John Ruskin
Temperance, in the nobler sense, does not mean a subdued and imperfect energy it does not mean a stopping short in any good thing, as in love and in faith but it means the power which governs the most intense energy, and prevents its acting in way but as it ought.
John Ruskin
One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.
John Ruskin