"Ruskin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... read in the great literary and sermonic literature, the work of Bossuet, Massillon, Chrysostom, Augustine, Fenelon, Marcus Aurelius, mediaeval homilies, Epictetus, Pascal, Guyon, Amiel, Vinet, La Brunetiere, Phelps, Jeremy Taylor, Barrows, Fuller, Whitefield, Bushnell, Edwards, Bacon, Newman, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Davies, Law, Bunyan, Luther, Spalding, Robertson, Kingsley, Maurice, Chalmers, Guthrie, Stalker, Drummond, Maclaren, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks, yes, even John Stuart Mill. All these men, by whatever name or school they are ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Victorian literature, is a person without ideals, the practical man. But just now the fashion is all for the things. Ruskin and Carlyle set it going, and to-day the demand for ideals exceeds the supply. And as a result, we meet with innumerable people anxious to have the correct thing, but a little unsympathetic or inexpert, and those unavoidable people who do ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... "Ruskin took a common rock-crystal and saw hidden within its stolid heart lessons which have not yet ceased to move men's lives. Beecher stood for hours before the window of a jewelry store thinking out analogies between jewels and the souls of men. Gough saw in a single drop of water enough truth ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... little cottages. As black Sam, our driver, a runaway Texan slave, suggested, it looked as though the villagers might pull down their houses and locate themselves and their families in their churches. We thought of Mr. Ruskin, who has somewhere expressed an earnest desire that all the money and energy that England has wasted in making railroads, had been spent in building churches; and we wished he had been here to see his ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... What John Ruskin said in his famous historic essay applies to Russia: "I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war." Every great Russian reform has taken place suddenly as a consequence of some nation-wide calamity. The Tartar invasion ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... by:—Some while ago {19b} Carlyle sent me a Letter from an American gentleman named Norton (once of the N. American Review, C. says, and a most amiable, intelligent Gentleman)—whose Letter enclosed one from Ruskin, which had been entrusted to another American Gentleman named Burne Jones—who kept it in a Desk ten years, and at last forwarded it as aforesaid—to me! The Note (of Ruskin's) is about one of the Persian Translations: almost childish, as that Man of Genius is apt to be in his Likes as well ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... was a talk with Mr. Holman Hunt, the eminent pre-Raphaelite artist. He told me much of Tennyson dwelling upon his morbid fear that people would stare at him. He also gave an account of his meeting with Ruskin at Venice, when Ruskin took Hunt to task for not having come to see him more frequently in London; to which Hunt replied that, for one reason, he was very busy, and that, for another, he did not wish to be classed with the toadies who swarmed about Ruskin. Whereupon ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... is that the loss to humanity by the discontinuance of such a type is greater than the gain. "Conceit in smallest bodies strongest works," and it does not follow that a sense of one's own excellence justifies one's utmost fecundity or the reverse. Mr. Vrooman, who, with Mrs. Vrooman, founded Ruskin Hall at Oxford, writes to much the same effect. He argues that people intelligent enough and moral enough to form such resolutions are just the sort of people who ought not to form them. Mr. Stuart Menteath also makes a most admirable ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... our fighting men brings into realization the vision so strongly cherished by John Ruskin—the vision of the time when soldiership should develop into a form of modern knight-errantry, and the "passion to bless and save" should inspire those who were formerly drilled only in the exercises of conquest ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... interested in women to hate them, note this: he is only searching for the right woman, the woman who compares favorably with the ideal woman in his own mind. He measures every woman by this standard, just as Ruskin compared all modern painters with Turner and discarded them with fitting adjectives as they receded from what he regarded as the perfect type. If Ruskin had not been much interested in painters, would he have written ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... of England," as it is generally called, is a book which, for various reasons, has never received from readers of Mr. Ruskin's writings the attention it deserves. True, it has always been sought after by connoisseurs, and collectors never fail with their eleven or twelve guineas whenever a set of Artist's Proofs of the First Edition of 1856 comes into the market. But to the General Reader the book ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... consciousness has not passed over us in vain; and if any generic distinction is to be found between our recent, often penetrating and beautiful, poetry of the English countryside and the Nature description of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, it is in the ground-tone of passion and memory that pervades it for England herself. Wordsworth wrote magnificently of England threatened with invasion, and magnificently of the Lake Country, Nature's ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... both—thus "Dear Father and Mother." But write to her alone next time. How about that course in Geology given by Shaler? I thought you were going to take that? I had rather you take that than any course in English Composition. Read Ruskin's "Modern Painters" when you get a chance. Read Emerson's "English Traits" ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... England, which always follows at a certain rate behind us in our social movements, is beginning to raise very loudly the same complaint. The condition of service has been thought worthy of public attention in some of the leading British prints; and Ruskin, in a summing-up article, speaks of it as a deep ulcer in society,—a ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... merit of being not only durable and cleanable, but they belong to the category of pictures; to what Ruskin calls "portable art," and one need not grudge the devotion of considerable time, study, and effort to their doing, since they are really detachable property, and can be removed from one house or room and carried to another at the ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... country house in a good park has not often in itself much of the picturesque. Ruskin would not consider Glanyravon, with its heavy porch, massive square walls, and innumerable long windows, a good specimen of architectural beauty; still it is a most comfortable dwelling, beautifully situated; and the magnificent woods at the back, and grand view in front, would make the most unartistic ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... is there a person living whose impressions you would care to hear either upon the Coliseum, Niagara Falls, or any other of the great works of art or of nature? On such subjects the remarks of the cleverest and stupidest are equally inadequate and the superb vocabulary of a Ruskin will probably not be more illuminating than what the school-boy writes in the Visitors' Book at Niagara, "Uncle ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... mental attitude in the modern child, Ruskin gives a charming example, in his "Ethics of the Dust." "One morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she would find Alice in them, and at last ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... time, place and circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch either to pet the other. Oppression is never good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where there is no war. A true beauty and a needed utility may bristle on first collision but they soon make friends. Was it not Ruskin himself who wanted to butt the railway-train off the track and paw up the rails—something like that? But even between them and the landscape there is now an entente cordiale. I have seen the hand of Joseph Pennell make ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... viii. 10. A translation of this work is in Bibliotheca Pastorum, ed. J. Ruskin, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... lately reading chapters from the life of another only son, and though the comparison may not bear working out, still, that there were points of strong similarity between the days of the youthful poet at Binfield and those of Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected. Pope's education was, of course, private, for a double reason—his proscribed faith and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, with a touching faith in public schools, has the hardihood to regret that it was obviously impossible to send Pope to Westminster. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with Carlyle's gospel of work and Ruskin's medievalism, developed by William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridicule of the comic opera "Patience," and lately revived in some of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in various centers in this ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Series (Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1893). An accurate and inexpensive edition is that in the Canterbury Classics (Rand-McNally & Co., Chicago). It is one of the most pathetic stories in all literature, conforming precisely to Ruskin's theory that a child's story ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... imitated, purposely, the rudeness of the early painters, and even favourably distinguished the juvenile works of Raphael when he was as yet the mere copyist of Perugino. It is thus only the reformed schools the Pre-Raphaelists avoid; for Mr Ruskin's notion, that there were no schools at all before Raphael, is quite too wild for answer.[2] The name, however, is of little consequence. The nature returned to is obviously, to any one who has eyes in his head, the nature of the middle ages; and if our readers will look again at the quotations ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... a transfigured phrase,' replied the poet, 'is worth all your scientific dictionaries and logic threshing-machines put together. Ruskin was in error. He tells us that Milton always meant what he said, and said exactly ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... RUSKIN,—Some time since I troubled you with a note or two about sea-birds, etc.... but perhaps I should never have ventured to trouble you again, had not your lecture on the 'Storm Clouds' touched a subject ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... source of regret that even a shadow of reproach should be cast upon distinguished men, particularly when the question of blame is debatable, as when, for instance, a picture portraying the love affair between Sir John Millais, the artist, and Ruskin's wife, was actually produced ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than Mahaffy; teachers of the world as well as of Oxford. There was Ruskin for instance, who appealed to me intensely—a wonderful man and a most wonderful writer. A sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief. Ruskin has always seemed to me the Plato of England—a Prophet of the Good and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... command at home, whose friendship I have the honour to enjoy: 'There has been a great deal too much surrendering in this war, and I hope people who do so will not be encouraged.' Fate had intervened, yet though her tone was full of irony she seemed to say, as I think Ruskin once said, 'It matters very little whether your judgments of people are true or untrue, and very much whether they are kind or unkind,' and repeating that I ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... most of the remainder of his life was spent. His work, striking and original, was at first utterly misunderstood by the public. The most famous piece of hostile criticism to which he was subjected was Ruskin's remark, after looking at "The Falling Rocket" in 1877, that here was a fellow with the effrontery to charge a hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. Some further years of abuse followed, and then the pendulum swung the other way, and the eccentric artist became ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... as there was was usually obtained by following in a mechanical way a drawing provided by an artist who often knew little of the technical processes involved in production. With the critical attention given to the crafts by Ruskin and Morris, it came to be seen that it was impossible to detach design from craft in this way, and that, in the widest sense, true design is an inseparable element of good quality, involving as it does the selection ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... for a moment confused. He was thinking of such books as Carlyle's "Past and Present"—Emerson's "Essays" and the works of Ruskin. But he remembered in good time that for an old "basket-maker" to be familiar with such literary masterpieces might seem strange to a wide-awake "journalist," therefore he ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the aesthetic movement (Ruskin, Morris, the Pre- Raphaelite painters; then Pater's Lectures on the Renaissance, 1873) was also a sign of the times. For the attitude of these critics, artists, and poets was essentially pagan. The saving truths of theology were for them as if they did not exist. The ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... and sixty in "Ivanhoe." The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine's is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that "a sentence of 'Modern Painters' was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour,—perhaps a forenoon,—before it was passed for the printer." Each writer has his method; Scott was ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... deserves mention here. This was in his chosen realm, a tale taken from the ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with martyrs' blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. It contains some of his best work, but its merit is rather poetic than dramatic, although Ruskin praised it for the closeness with which it entered into the temper of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Neither had literature fallen behind. Perhaps it had rarely shown a more brilliant galaxy of contemporary names, including those of John Stuart Mill in logic, Herbert Spencer in philosophy, Charles Darwin in natural science, Ruskin in art criticism, Helps as an essayist. And in this year Tennyson brought out his "In Memoriam," and Kingsley his "Alton Lock". It seemed but natural that the earlier lights should be dying out before the later; that Lord Jeffrey, the old ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... Ossian. Of course Shakspeare's omniscience included all natural phenomena; but the rest, great or small, associate themselves with some special aspects, and not with the daily atmosphere. Coming to our own times, one must quarrel with Ruskin as taking rather the artist's view of Nature, selecting the available bits and dealing rather patronizingly with the whole; and one is tempted to charge even Emerson, as he somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not being of a temperament quite liquid and musical enough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... edition of Ruskin, and some exquisite prints of Rossetti's best known works, supplied a different set of emblems, whilst the room generally showed signs ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... for you to sneer, and talk about art. But there are already in this world a deal more Standard Works than any man can hope to digest in the average lifetime. I don't quarrel with them, for, personally, I find even Ruskin, like the python in the circus, entirely endurable so long as there is a pane of glass between us. But why, in heaven's name, should you endeavour to harass humanity with one more battalion of morocco-bound reproaches for sins of omission, whenever ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... poor latter-day mortals have become so deadly accustomed to the routine of useless work and wasteful play, that a writer must needs cross all the t's and dot all the i's of his conviction (held also by other sentimentalists and cranks called Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris) that the bread and wine of life are not grown in the Black Country; no, nor life's flowers in the horticultural establishments (I will not call them ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Birds, and Plutus). Of travels, I read myself all old ones I can get hold of; of modern, Humboldt is the central model. Forbes (James Forbes in Alps) is essential to the modern Swiss tourist—of sense." Mr. Ruskin puts the word all to Plato, everything to Carlyle, and every word to Scott. Pindar's name he adds in the list of the classics, and after Bacon's name he writes ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... our services as interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of his suggestions that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of enthusiastic undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr. Ruskin's direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather amateurish, but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of pure good feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... sets of realities—material and spiritual—but they are so interwoven that all practical laws are exponents of moral laws. Such is the thesis which Ruskin expounds with so much insight and eloquence in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which he argues that the laws of architecture are moral laws, as applicable to the building of character as to the construction of cathedrals. He finds ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... mustache that might have otherwise impeded his voice, and began: "Thanksgiving goes probably far deeper than you folks suppose. I am not sure but it is the source of the highest poetry—as in parts of the Bible. Ruskin, indeed, makes the central source of all great art to be praise (gratitude) to the Almighty for life, and the universe with its objects and play ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and distinctively spoken to. The effort is to reconcile culture with the world of practice and morals, and answer or forestall the objections of religion or utilitarianism. Mr. Hamerton talks with great self-possession to the highest class within ear-shot, and matches a late stricture of Mr. Ruskin's—that English noblemen exist to shoot little birds—with another on the influence of railways in sending back the upper ranks to a state of nomadic barbarism. "Their life," he says, "may be quite accurately ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... back to it again when they had looked at all the others and speculated as to whether Carpaccio knew how funny he was when he painted Saint Jerome among the brethren, and whether in the last picture he was really in heaven as Ruskin reported. ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of Ruskin's has always been spoilt for me by the wilful incursion of two French words, which seem to me to break the continuity of the sentence: 'A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages; may not be able to speak any but his own; may have read ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... other advantage not less important. We sometimes speak as if to visit a country, and to see it, were the same thing. But this is not so. It is not every one who can see Switzerland like a Ruskin or a Tyndall. Their beautiful descriptions of mountain scenery depend less on their mastery of the English language, great as that is, than on their power of seeing what is before them. It has been to me therefore a matter of much interest to know which aspects of Nature have given the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... too, among those old populations, there was one saving element; the now want of which, especially the unlamented want, transcends all lamentation. Here is one of those strange, piercing, winged-words of Ruskin, which has in it a terrible truth for us in these ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the angry and resentful reception of the Pre-Raphaelites another instance of the absolutely indefensible nature of many of the most beautiful propositions. And as a still more striking and remarkable case, take the onslaught made by Ruskin upon the works of Whistler. You will remember that a libel action ensued and that these pictures were gravely reasoned about by barristers and surveyed by jurymen to ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... order of John Ruskin. Indeed I am! I would make this country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and women in it should be the Queen. They should never come into contact with politics or economics—or any of those things. And we men would work ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and occupations, are treated by the poets of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth or Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode; and is not greater, I think, than the difference between the descriptions in the "Allegro," and the descriptions in "Men and Women;" than the difference between the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... it scandalized me. My desire was to continue to delight in those sacred pages, for which I still had an instinctive veneration. Yet I could not but observe the difference between the zeal with which I snatched at a volume of Carlyle or Ruskin—since these magicians were now first revealing themselves to me—and the increasing languor with which I took up Alford for my daily 'passage'. Of course, although I did not know it, and believed my reluctance to be sinful, the real reason why I now found the Bible so ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Ruskin earnestly counsels us to form the habit of looking intensely at words. We should scrutinize them closely and endeavor to grasp their innermost meaning. There is an indefinable satisfaction in knowing how to choose and use words with accuracy and precision. ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... pictures, and Constable, who couldn't, between them filled up the measure of English art without any other aid than that of the materials with which they recorded their gorgeous communion with nature. When Ruskin stepped in with the "Modern Painters," originally designed as a vindication of Turner against certain later-day critics, Turner's comment was, "He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head and points ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... attempted. These were now to be directed with new accuracy and ardour upon the fabric and behaviour of the world of sense. Our debt to the great masters in physical science who overtook and almost out-stripped the task cannot be measured; and, under the honourable leadership of Ruskin, we may all well do penance if we have failed "in the respect due to their great powers of thought, or in the admiration due to the far scope of their discovery." ("Queen of the Air", Preface, page vii. London, 1906.) With what miraculous mental ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... books, there lay others from a class not hitherto very congenial to him, that which contains the great examples in our day, outside the poets, of the poetical or imaginative treatment of ethics—Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin. At an age when most young minds of intelligence amongst us are first seized by these English masters, he had been wandering in French paths. 'Sartor Resartus,' Emerson's 'Essays,' 'The Seven Lamps,' came to him ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... growth which hang within reach of the cattle are stripped of their buds and leaves, and soon wither and fall off. These effects are observable at a great distance, and a wood-pasture is recognized, almost as far as it can be seen, by the regularity with which its lower foliage terminates at what Ruskin somewhere calls the "cattle-line." This always runs parallel to the surface of the ground, and is determined by the height to which domestic quadrupeds can reach to feed upon the leaves. In describing a visit to the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... If, as Ruskin says, "the bird is little more than a drift of the air, brought into form by plumes," the particular bit shaped into the form we call the orchard oriole must be a breath from a Western tornado, for ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... intention of Mr. Willett to go with us to visit Mr. Ruskin, with whom he is in the most friendly relations. But a letter from Mr. Ruskin's sister spoke of his illness as being too serious for him to see company, and we reluctantly gave up this ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... converse and live together; so that we can express our thoughts and emotions in terms of Nature; or so that Nature can have, as it were, a human soul. This is not Browning's conception. If he had such a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively common in Tennyson. I can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this in all the poetry of Browning. Even where it seems to occur, where Nature is spoken of in ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... in the matter of literary criticism is that, as Ruskin told us, he was the first man in the literary circles of London to assert the value of Modern Painters. "He said it was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a complete revolution ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... colour against the gray tint of the room; and possibly Roger Ascham, seeing our audience-room before and after the hanging of it, might have had a thought of Antwerp. The stage is the one thing in the world privileged to deceive. The most devoted reader of Ruskin can tolerate shams here. The costumes were devised with constant reference to Charles Knight, and, to the eye, were of the gayest silk, satin, and velvet. There was, moreover, a profusion of jewels, which, for all one could see, sparkled with all the lustre of the great Florentine diamond, as you ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... excites Mr. Ruskin's indignation, are surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... appeal to judgments which the Renaissance work has itself distorted. I felt this difficulty very forcibly as I read a slight review of my former work, "The Seven Lamps," in "The Architect:" the writer noticed my constant praise of St. Mark's: "Mr. Ruskin thinks it a very beautiful building! We," said the Architect, "think it a very ugly building." I was not surprised at the difference of opinion, but at the thing being considered so completely a subject of opinion. My ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... get up and make the fire; it will seem so much warmer if laid by your fair hands!' To women is also conceded the right to be religious and unfortunately it often happens that all the religion a man has is in his wife's name. Ruskin said: 'If you don't want the kingdom of heaven to come, don't pray for it but if you do want it to come you must do more than pray for it.' Women must vote as well as pray. Whoever is able to make peace in this ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... which Ruskin draws between the fancy and the imagination may help us to discern the true and the false in Symbolism. "Fancy has to do with the outsides of things, and is content therewith. She can never feel, but is one of the most purely and simply intellectual of the faculties. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... develop, must be bound up with industry by a thousand intermediate degrees, blended, so to say, as Ruskin and the great Socialist poet Morris have proved so often and so well. Everything that surrounds man, in the street, in the interior and exterior of public monuments, must be of ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Ruskin gives this poem high praise: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages.... I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... [Footnote 242: Mr. Ruskin has somewhere maintained that the decline of Venice was not due to this cause, but to fornication. He should read the record given by Mutinelli (Diari Urbani, p. 157), of Venetian fornication in 1340, at the time when the Ducal ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Ruskin, in "The Ethics of Dust", referring to the valley of diamonds, remarks that "many people go to real places and never see them; and many people pass through this valley of diamonds and never ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... that would have gladdened the heart of Ruskin and Morris, though I do not know that either of these was consciously recognised as an influence. A movement arose for beautifying the studies, which began with pseudo-Japanese lamp-shades, and moved upward through pretty curtains and tablecloths to framed "Medici" pictures. ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... branches, prose and poetry. For prose may have rhythm. All that can be said is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in verse ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... the best magazines and ablest weeklies, as well as more elaborate works, not excepting such authors as De Tocqueville, Mill, Ruskin, Buckle, Guizot, &c. In espousing the cause of the oppressed as a poet and lecturer, had she neglected to fortify her mind in the manner she did, she would have been weighed and found wanting long since. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... conscience which seems to stifle the noblest effort in the individual because his intellectual conception and his achievement are so difficult to bring together, is found on a large scale in society itself, when we have the separation of the people who think from those who work. And yet, since Ruskin ceased, no one has really formulated this in a convincing form. And even Ruskin's famous dictum, that labor without art brutalizes, has always been interpreted as if art could only be a sense of beauty or joy in one's own work, and not a sense of companionship with all other workers. The situation ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... question. There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine can never atone. Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found in the spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world by the vandalism of the age. Steam launches violate the sanctity of the Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the filthy funnels of our modern shipping; electric cars run in the shadow of the pyramids; and it was ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Ruskin on Turner! When one has hit the bull's-eye, there is nothing left but to lay down the gun, and go ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... by the hasty withdrawal of the spiritistic representatives as soon as they learned that strictly scientific methods of inquiry were to prevail; or by the accession, as honorary members, of national figures like W. E. Gladstone, John Ruskin, Lord Tennyson, A. R. Wallace, Sir William Crookes, and ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... study of the three foremost Englishmen in the republic of letters,—Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin,—with their personal traits, literary ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... would encourage superficiality. But Littleton seemed appreciative of the value of the undertaking, and he made his promise good forthwith by forwarding to her a package of books on art, among them two volumes of Ruskin. Selma, who had read quotations from Ruskin on one or two occasions and believed herself an admirer of, and tolerably familiar with, his writings, was thrilled. She promptly immersed herself in "Stones of Venice" and "Seven Lamps of Architecture," ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... education; it's beyond all question Gothic. Look at the steeple and the gargoyles and the handsome vegetation. Ruskin would ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... masses understand, for instance, that Darwin said that "men are descended from monkeys." Only summary and glib propositions of that kind can ever get currency. The learned men are all the time trying to recoin them and give them at least partial reality. Ruskin set afloat some notions of art criticism, which have penetrated all our cultivated classes. They are not lost, but see what has become of them in fifty years by popularization. A little later a new gospel of furniture ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... man has done his work," says Ruskin, "and nothing can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate if he will; but what excuse can you find for willfulness of thought at the very time ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... upon the Annals, but in terms of enthusiastic commendation, for he praises such writing as first-rate workmanship—"adjustments by design," says the ingenious German; not, of course, the unconscious errors, that a modern European might make in a case of forgery: the discovery reminds me of Mr. Ruskin's unqualified eulogies of everything done by the brush of Turner, which caused the great artist to observe: —"This gentleman has found out to be beauties what I have always ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... leather, and he wrote comic stuff in a Yale magazine which made him admiringly regarded as a sort of junior George Ade. It was only in secret, and then with a sneaking sense of shame, that he allowed his idealistic side to feed on Browning and Ruskin, Maeterlinck and Barrie, and only when alone on vacation that he bathed in the beauty of French cathedrals, sat thrilled and stirred by the waves of melody of the great composers, drew up curiously touched and awed at the sight of the places in ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... it was not long ere we passed under the portal of St. Mark's, though we lingered long outside, admiring its beautiful proportions, described by Ruskin in a burst of pure poetry as "a multitude of pillars and grey-hooded domes clustered into a long, low pyramid of coloured light: a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaics ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... felt, or even thought of, their deficiencies. There were no "missions" in those days; it was fifty or sixty years before the formation of the "Kennett Psychological Society," and "Pamela," "Rasselas," and "Joseph Andrews," were lent and borrowed, as at present "Consuelo," Buckle, Ruskin, and "Enoch Arden." ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... to meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... studies of cloud scenery were almost a revelation to mankind. In all this Turner drew his instruction as well as his inspiration from nature. The critics did nothing for him; he rather opened the eyes of even such men as Ruskin to the wonders of the natural world. But these results all came later, and were the fruit of and resulted from his constant ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... of vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and stupidity. Out of all this, and in the sunshine, in the enchanted region of which great artists alone have had the secret, in the sacred footsteps of Byron, of Shelley, of the Brownings, of Turner and Ruskin. Dont you envy ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm. The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had roused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia dreaming of Italian liberty. Casa Guidi ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... your dear letter so much! I am always delighted when anyone writes me a beautiful thought which I can treasure in my memory forever. It is because my books are full of the riches of which Mr. Ruskin speaks that I love them so dearly. I did not realize until I began to write the sketch for the Companion, what precious companions books have been to me, and how blessed even my life has been: and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... John Ruskin (1819-1900), the greatest master of ornate prose in the English language, was born in London and educated at Oxford. He studied painting, and became a graceful and accurate draftsman, but he early transferred ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... this historic town seem impregnated with the spirit of restful antiquity.' (Extract from one of Aunt Celia's letters.) Among the great men who have studied here are the Prince of Wales, Duke of Wellington, Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Philip Sidney, William Penn, John Locke, the two Wesleys, Ruskin, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Otway. (Look ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... leaning against Heine—what would she have said to that, I wonder?—with Miss Mitford and Cranford to keep her in countenance on her other side. Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the one that has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. Here are Ruskin, Lubbock, White's Selborne, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Wuthering Heights, Lamb's Essays, Johnson's Lives, Marcus ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... in the works of the descriptive anthropologist is certainly a very entertaining and quaint person, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would appeal to us more strongly. Yet where are the books? As Ruskin has said somewhere, a propos of Darwin, it is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Trees, with their strange fight against all the laws of gravity, striving upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and faith; the sight of them cheers us. A land without trees is depressing and gloomy. As Ruskin says, "The sea wave, with all its beneficence, is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue mountain is lifted towards Heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy; and while the one surges unfathomable in its darkness, the other is unshaken ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... it is strange that any true believer should overlook. Ruskin, in writing "Of the King's Treasuries," refers to the universal ambition for 'advancement in life,' which means 'getting into good society.' How many obstacles one finds in securing an introduction to the great and good of this world, and even then in getting access to them, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... of its texture, and for the regularity and smoothness of its surface, but still more for its colour. Whether merely warm grey, as when dry, or bright purple, as when wet, the colour of the English slate well justifies Mr. Ruskin's saying, that wherever there is a brick wall and a slate roof there need be no want of rich colour in an English landscape. But most beautiful is the hue of slate, when, shining wet in the sunshine after a summer shower, its blue is brought out in rich contrast by golden spots of ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... the century to the other day there was a succession of authors in France who knew how to write as scarcely any but Mr. Ruskin or Mr. Swinburne have ever written in England. They doubled the opulence and the significance of language, and made prose more sonorous and more penetrating than anything but the highest poetry. There ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Ruskin has somewhere brought out the idea in his finest phraseology that nowhere can man so readily worship God as in the presence of the most beautiful of His works in Nature. This is readily apparent at Tahoe, hence the summer visitors and others of religious trend will delight to learn ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... old fashioned in my ideas about the terrors and inconveniences of the next world. And now I must be running away; I've got to open a Free Library somewhere. You know the sort of thing that happens—one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and read 'Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?' Don't forget, please, I'm going to have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting on a sundial. And just one thing more—perhaps ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... sensational French books appear to be translated. But as French painters and actors now habitually surpass all others even in what are claimed as the English qualities,—simplicity and truth,—so do French prose-writers excel. To be set against the brutality of Carlyle and the shrill screams of Ruskin, there is to be seen across the Channel the extraordinary fact of an actual organization of good writers, the French Academy, whose influence all nations feel. Under their authority we see introduced into literary work an habitual grace and perfection, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... and swiftness of a lightning stroke, Edward was the incarnation of Success. When he said that one's ideas were "rot," when he spoke with contempt of "mollycoddles"—then indeed one suffered in soul, and had to go back to Shelley and Ruskin ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Dryden frequented.' Johnson's Works, viii. 236. Who touched old Northcote's hand? Has the apostolic succession been continued?—Since writing these lines I have read with pleasure the following passage in Mr. Ruskin's Praeterita, chapter i. p. 16:—'When at three-and-a-half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet.' Dryden, Pope, Reynolds, Northcote, Ruskin, so runs the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... later I went through another factory, and I came out weary and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted nations, and began ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... connected with his belief in beauty as a revelation of the divine intentions, "the seal which God sets upon his works." Thus the natural beauty, which is perceived by the pure heart, when contemplating some object untouched by the hand of man, is far superior to the work of the artist. Ruskin was too little capable of analysis to understand the complicated psychologico-aesthetic process taking place within him, as he contemplated some streamlet, or the nest of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun to be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the sun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of Joshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... here. She's just started to read Ruskin this afternoon. She says she's going to begin and read all of him straight through. That's ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... streets and erect his houses.' Thus, although, from an artistic point of view, we shall never be reconciled to the changes that have come over Normandy, we cannot ignore the consequent social advantages. Mr. Ruskin, speaking of the change in Switzerland during his memory of it (thirty-five years) says:—'In that half of the permitted life of man I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... excellent notion to buy an estate, instead of picking up what Mr. RUDYARD KIPLING calls a "smeared thing." Got one, too, pretty cheap. Twenty miles from a railway station, but so much the better. RUSKIN hates railway stations, and so do I. Never can make them look picturesque. The Agent tells me my place is famous for its sunsets; also good moonlight effects on occasions. Pretty village, too, in the background. Altogether, most satisfactory. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... the First Read Before the League of the Republic at the University of California, December the Fifth, Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, and the Second Read Before the Ruskin Club of ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... I, "I am not disputing that! But I remember Ruskin's insisting—I think in Sesame and Lilies—that no true artist ever talks much of his art. The greatest are silent. 'The moment,' says Ruskin, 'a man can really do his work he becomes speechless about it. All words become idle to him—all theories.' And he goes on to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... has studied Carlyle or Ruskin, it will be well to begin with a comparison of these two men with Emerson in order to show the latter's place as a self-appointed teacher and his motives in presenting to his audience such matters as he discusses in his essays and ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... no! Intellectual games. Bouts-rimes; translations—Lady Dunstable looks out the bits and some people think the words—beforehand; paragraphs on a subject—in a particular style—Pater's, or Ruskin's, or Carlyle's. Each person throws two slips into a hat. On one you write the subject, on another the name of the author whose style is to be imitated. Then you draw. Of course Lady Dunstable carries off all the honours. But then everybody ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... owners. As in Ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. 'Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own.' Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... deceived with ornament" which "obscures the show of evil," he was expressing downright hatred—not suspicion—of sham, of quackery, of cant. His is the message of all commanding intellects which see through the hearts of men. Shakespeare's message is Carlyle's message or Ruskin's message anticipated by nearly three centuries, and more potently ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... given at Oxford on January 20, February 9, and February 23, 1871. They were not public Lectures, like Professor Ruskin's other courses, but addressed only to undergraduates who had joined his class. They were illustrated by pictures from his collection, of which several are here reproduced, and by others which may be seen in the Oxford University Galleries or in ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... Wordsworth. Of all the songs of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have died for love." To one who has always recognized the greatness of this poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it, it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in Modern Painters, where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination. It is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara died") who ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... good to resent love's going where it is sent. He had married, knowing that her respect and admiration but not her love, were his, a beautiful and brilliant girl much younger than himself. They lived happily a number of years. Then Ruskin brought home the painter, Millais, to make a picture of his wife. Artist and model fell in love. Ruskin found it out, and refused to allow his wife to sacrifice herself for him. He divorced her and gave her to Millais, and the ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne |
