770 Quotes by John Ruskin

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.

One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.

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.

Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.

Color is, in brief terms, the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth; and again, with its fruits; also, with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man.

It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.

Ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

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.