"Ruskin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... scaled the "lofty mountains" that had so hemmed in his early view, and made his way into the intellectual kingdoms of the modern world that lay beyond. The Weltgeist had appealed to him with its irresistible behest, just as it appealed at about the same time to Ibsen and Tolstoy and Ruskin, and had made him a man of new interests ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... mercy towards men. The soul thus discovers its true haven; it lays down the sword; its voice calls no longer to strife, but to peace; it now inspires and uplifts, and Greek literature ends with Socrates and Plato, Rome with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, England with Carlyle and Ruskin, America with Emerson, and Germany with Goethe. Letters indeed go on in England, in America, and in Germany, but the cycle is completed; and higher than Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the soul need not seek to rise. Whatever comes henceforth can ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... no "criticism of life;" it is a criticism of strange death; and, so far, may recall Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book, unpublished, of course, in 1830. Naturally this kind of poetry is "useless," as Mr. Ruskin says about Coleridge, but, in its bizarre ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... reality." The resources of the house also afforded certain very hot biscuits or breadcakes, in a high state of saleratus;—indeed, it must have been from association with these, that certain yellow streaks in Mr. Ruskin's drawing of the rock, at the Athenaeum, awakened in me such an immediate sense of indigestion;—also fried potatoes, baked beans, mince-pie, and pickles. The children partook of these dainties largely, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... earnest, then, in thought and deed, Nor fear approaching night; Calm comes with evening light, And hope and peace. Thy duty heed 'to-day.'" —RUSKIN. ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... nobler preface to the reader. That is the language peculiar to their own day. But the language of the Bible itself is that form which had lived its way into common use. One hundred years after Wiclif it yet speaks his language in large part, for that part had really lived. In the Bibliotheca Pastorum Ruskin makes comment on Sir Philip Sidney and his metrical version of the Psalms in these words: "Sir Philip Sidney will use any cow-boy or tinker words if they only help him to say precisely in English what David said ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers must admit that their voices are a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. His lack of historical training limits his curiosity concerning certain phases of his European surroundings; but he uses his eyes well upon such general objects as trains, hotel-service, and Englishmen. In spite of his habitual geniality, he ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... presumption 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 suggestion with regard to male and female ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... agreed, promptly giving Ruskin the go-by. "And why don't you come in our gondola? You don't want all that clutter going about ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... 'Plays of the Passions,' Miss Burney's 'Evelina,' or some such novels; and Mrs. Barbauld's works are also in their place. When I asked for them, two pretty old Quaker volumes were put into my hands, with shabby grey bindings, with fine paper and broad margins, such as Mr. Ruskin would approve. Of all the inhabitants of this bookshelf Mrs. Barbauld is one of the most appropriate. It is but a few minutes' walk from the library in Heath Street to the old corner house in Church Row where she lived for a time, near a hundred years ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... leaves an impression—the quiet white house in its garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as an effort Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris—though that be ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... "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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... form was written nearly twenty years ago with the intention of contributing a volume to a series of University Extension Manuals. For that purpose it included a sketch of Ruskin's "Work," with some attempt to describe the continuous development of his thought. It had the advantage—and the disadvantage—of being written under his eye; that is to say, he saw as much of it as his health allowed; and it received his ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... "if you're on that tack, you're hopeless. What have you been reading? 'The Young Maiden's Own Ruskin,' or 'Look Up ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... best exercises for the student of public speaking is to read aloud daily, taking care to read as he would speak. He should choose one of the standard writers, such as Stevenson, Ruskin, Newman, or Carlyle, and while reading severely criticize his delivery. Such reading should be done standing up and as if addressing an audience. This simple exercise will, in the course of a few weeks, yield the most ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... the half-penny morning paper, in which he had just come upon a paragraph describing the discovery by the police of a batch of infernal machines supposed to have been sent over from America by friends of the Royalists. Among the emissaries captured he read the name of Cedric Ruskin, an old schoolfellow and great-grandson to an art critic of that surname who flourished in former days by force of his own specific gravity. Pained at the intelligence, he sighed heavily, and was on the point of sitting down upon a rustic bench close ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... present the church may do a confounded lot of harm. Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism and even preaching socialism. Don't think I want to be overcritical. I admit there's no end of things to be said for a proper sort of socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We're all Socialists nowadays. Ideals—excellent. But—it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense of moral support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them to forget duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that sort of thing. ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the most purely poetical nature in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as possible—as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing incomprehensible about ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... dresses and actresses incomparably the prettiest. But Tennyson liked Society no better than did General Gordon. He had friends enough, and no desire for new acquaintances. Indeed, his fortune was shattered at this time by a strange investment in wood- carving by machinery. Ruskin had only just begun to write, and wood- carving by machinery was still deemed an enterprise at once philanthropic and aesthetic. "My father's worldly goods were all gone," says Lord Tennyson. The poet's health suffered extremely: he tried a fashionable "cure" at Cheltenham, where he saw miracles ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... gladly embraced an opportunity to leave the Customs for the position of assistant editor of Fraser's Magazine under Froude, whom he afterward succeeded as editor. He was now a member of a brilliant literary circle, knew Tennyson, Ruskin, and Carlyle, and was admitted into the warm friendship of the Pre-Raphaelites. But in no way does he reflect the Pre-Raphaelite spirit by which he was surrounded; nor does he write his lyrics in the metres and rhythms of mediaeval France. He is as oblivious of rondeaux, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the spirit of the man who said to his wife: 'Angelina, you 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 distracted world is the one who should ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... more abstruse and deeper in feeling, and comparatively few of Mr. Ruskin's followers through the first cared to get entangled in the metaphysical mazes of the second, and it is generally neglected, although containing some of the deepest and most satisfactory studies on the fundamental principles of art and taste ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... with those barbarian, exclamatory souls who in guttural German or cockney English snort or neigh at the beauties industriously pointed out by a loud-voiced cicerone, quoting in American all the appropriate quotations, Browning before Filippo Lippi, Ruskin in S. Croce, Mrs. Browning at the door of S. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... 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 should ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... solely under the jurisdiction of the church; and the other is the reference to usury. Mind you, usury is interest. It didn't mean excessive interest, as it does now. As you probably know, the notion prevailed in the early Middle Ages that all usury—interest—was a sin and wrong; and even Ruskin has chapter after chapter arguing that principle, that it is wrong to take interest for money. I should perhaps add another reason why interest was so disliked in early England: There was very little money in early England; ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... seas, proud carrier of the traffic of the world, the center of international finance, the richest among all the investing nations—England was reeking with poverty. Beside her factories and warehouses were vile slums in which people huddled as Ruskin said, "so many brace to a garret." There in the back alleys of civilization babies were born and babies died, while those who survived grew to the impotent ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... "Brotherhood" had worked against the greatest discouragements for a long time, and felt nearly hopeless of success, John Ruskin, one of the greatest of critics and most fearless of men, who was so much respected that his words had great influence, suddenly published a defence of these Pre-Raphaelites. He declared that they were the greatest artists of the time, and while scorning their critics he applauded ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... in a model tenement on the lower East Side. The scene shows the living-room, furnished very plainly, but in the newest taste; "arts and crafts" furniture, portraits of Morris and Ruskin on the walls; a centre table, a couple of easy-chairs, a divan and many book-shelves. The entrance from the outer hall is at centre; entrance to the other rooms ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... note sit at meat with us. At the evening meal, if our visitors are so inclined, and are of the right fiber, I ask them to talk. And if there is no one else to speak, I sometimes read a little from William Morris, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman or Ruskin. David Bispham has sung for us. Maude Adams and Minnie Maddern Fiske have also favored us with a taste of their quality. Judge Lindsey, Alfred Henry Lewis, Richard Le Gallienne, Robert Barr, have visited us; but to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... "If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting and fancy free; if, pale ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... for being in the main subjective (to use the convenient word Mr. Ruskin is so angry with); for a young writer can only follow the German plan of conjuring things up "from the depths of his inward consciousness." The moment our author quits this sure ground, her touch becomes uncertain and her colors inharmonious. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... sure there is no hand comparable to the physician's in patient skill, merciful gentleness and splendid certainty. No wonder that Ruskin finds in the sure strokes of the surgeon the perfection of control and delicate precision for the artist to emulate. If the physician is a man of great nature, there will be healing for the spirit ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... reputation, did not blind him to defects; did not seduce him into indiscriminating praise; did not deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excess blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Mr. Ruskin's etymology. And as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary production was brought under Matthew Arnold's notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... as a unity. There are many, indeed, who cannot see the wood for the trees, as there are others who cannot see the trees for the wood. Carlyle cared nothing though science were able to turn a sunbeam on its axis; Ruskin sees little in the advance of invention except more slag-hills. And scientific men have not been slow to return with interest the scorn of the moralists. But a more comprehensive view of the movement of human knowledge will show that none labour in vain. For its movement is that ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... non-copyright poems; to the proprietors of Mr. and Mrs. Browning's copyrights and to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. for a similar favour, also for a copyright poem by Mrs. Browning; to Mr. George Allen for extracts from Ruskin and the author of Ionica; to Messrs. G. Bell & Sons for poems by Thomas Ashe; to Messrs. Chatto & Windus for poems by Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Dr. George MacDonald, and for confirming Mr. Bret Harte's permission; to Mr. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... summer when I was leading a rather isolated life, and my mind was far from sex subjects, being deep in books, Carlyle, Ruskin, Huxley, Darwin, Scott, etc. I noticed that when I got up in the morning I felt very hot and uncomfortable. The clitoris and the parts around were swollen and erect, and often tender and painful. I ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... since Bishop Simpson, Henry Ward Beecher, and Dr. Tyng champion our cause, and proclaim it 'woman's duty to vote for the good of humanity'? Who will now dare sneer while the leading minds of Europe—among them Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Mazzini, Victor Hugo—must share the odium ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... absence of truth—an absence arising, in great part, from ignorance of the way in which the aspects of things vary with the conditions? Do but remember the books and lectures by which students are instructed; or consider the criticisms of Ruskin; or look at the doings of the Pre-Raffaelites; and you will see that progress in painting implies increasing knowledge of how effects in Nature are produced. The most diligent observation, if unaided by science, fails to preserve from error. Every painter ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... The English artist—hearken to Ruskin on Turner! When one has hit the bull's-eye, there is nothing left but to lay down the gun, and go and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... to Yale. New energy in study and reading. Influence of Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Yale in 1850. My disappointment at the instruction; character of president and professors; perfunctory methods in lower-class rooms; "gerund-grinding'' vs. literature; James Hadley—his abilities and influence, other professors; influence of President Woolsey, Professors Porter, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... gave nature such careful and profound study. His 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 ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... thus sensitively constituted every moment trembles with possibilities; every hour is big with destiny. The neglected blow cannot afterward be struck on the cold iron; once the stamp is given to the soft metal it cannot be effaced. Well did Ruskin say; "Take your vase of Venice glass out of the furnace and strew chaff over it in its transparent heat, and recover that to its clearness and rubied glory when the north wind has blown upon it; but do not think to strew chaff ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... At that fatigue work I have seen whole companies of once smart-looking Guardsmen toiling with spade and pick like Kaffirs, whilst some of their aristocratic officers, bearing lordly titles, played the part of gangers over these soldier-navvies. It was a new version and a more useful one of Ruskin and his collegiate road-makers. ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... volume of Ruskin's Miscellanies, he discovered that it had been employed to support the dismantled leg of a dressing bureau. On another occasion, a volume of Schopenhauer, which he had been at much difficulty and expense to procure, Emerson's Essays, and two other volumes much prized, he found had ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Ruskin. Open his Lectures on Art, recently delivered before the University of Oxford, and read passage number seventy. Let us read it together, as we sit here in the presence of ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the one uneducated. See her in her home, reigning a queen, while her uneducated sister, though she may have wealth and beauty, will constantly feel the lack of that which gold cannot procure nor fortune provide. "We are foolish, and without excuse foolish," said Ruskin, "in speaking of the 'superiority' of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not; each completes the other, and is completed by the other; ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... except, perhaps, China. Its tympanum is sadly thickened at once with materialism and conceit; and the consequence is that a thinker there is either ignored into silence, like Wilkinson, or driven to bellow, like Carlyle, or to put rapiers and poignards into his speech, like Ruskin. Carlyle began speaking sweetly and humanly, and was heard only on this side the ocean; then he came to his bull-of-Bashan tones, and was attended to on his own side the water. It is observable, too, that, if a thinker ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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" and ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... first-rate books, and our taste for art is keen. When we go abroad we don't care so much for mountains and rivers—they are like potatoes and pork to a man who is visiting: we have them at home—but we are after art. Ruskin says no people can be great in art unless it lives among beautiful natural objects; which is hard on us Chicago folks. If we had any mountainous or rocky tracts we should not live in them. If we possessed a Mount Vesuvius we should use it for getting up bogus eruptions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... word, 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 ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... "fountains of sweet water" in the bitter sea of life; that chivalrous respect for the weak and the unprotected which, next to faith in God, will be the best guard to all the finer issues of his character. Truth of truth are the golden words of Ruskin to young men: ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... wear until they are only disks of metal. The 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 and house decoration was published. The ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 were not more than half a dozen, beginning with Chateaubriand, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... constant prowler about the nests of other birds, he is so wary and secretive that his little home is usually found only by accident. And the Swallow: "He is the bird of return," Michelet prettily says of him. If you will only treat him kindly, says Ruskin, year after year, he comes back to the same niche, and to the same hearth, for his nest. To the same niche! Think of this a little, as if you heard of it ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... sincerity, and he wondered how he came to that way of thinking. From his experience of himself he accounted for a prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau's reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect; he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... the objection of the Circuit Court that a lithograph which "has no other use than that of a mere advertisement * * * (would not be within) the meaning of the Constitution," Justice Holmes summoned forth the shades of Velasquez, Whistler, Rembrandt, Ruskin, Degas, and others in support of the proposition that it is not for the courts to attempt to judge the worth of pictorial illustrations outside the narrowest and most ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... or three 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 ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... sweet and serene superiority of the National Gallery canvases over the struggling competition manifest in the Turners juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of the great English painter. Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave very well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which revolution "consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." "Mainly" is delightful, but Claude's excellence consists ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... grandmothers. This is, unfortunately, rapidly becoming the age of machinery—and machinery, while it may be quicker, is certainly not so thorough as old-fashioned hand work. There is a new writer in England named Ruskin who is very bitter against machinery. He would like to see it abolished—at least, so he says. I will send for one of his books, and show it to you, if ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... of 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 not like the things but feel compelled to get them. ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... industry must be seized upon and conquered by those educators, who now either avoid it altogether by taking refuge in the caves of classic learning or beg the question by teaching the tool industry advocated by Ruskin and Morris in their first reaction against the present industrial system. It would mean that educators must bring industry into "the kingdom of the mind"; and pervade it with the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... 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 energy and divine good fortune—as ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... payers are not solid in defence of their position is that since we are not medieval rovers through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those we rob prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life—men like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin—have enormous social appetites and very fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they complain because the ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... commenced in Household Words for April 1, 1854; it is an attack on the "hard fact" school of philosophers; what Macaulay and Mr. Ruskin thought of it; the Russian war of 1854-5, and the cry for "Administrative Reform"; Dickens in the thick of the movement; "Little Dorrit" and the "Circumlocution Office"; character of Mr. Dorrit admirably drawn; Dickens ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... currents of thought which contributed to the formation of the Fabian Society, so far as I can recover them from memory and a survey of the periodical literature of the period. I have not included the writings of Ruskin, Socialist in outlook as some of them undoubtedly are, because I think that the value of his social teachings was concealed from most of us at that time by reaction against his religious mediaevalism, and indifference to his gospel of art. Books so eminently adapted for young ladies at mid-Victorian ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... picturesque figures in the politics of that time, insisted upon claiming his part in the condemnation. Not so much Radical as Anarchist, converted from the traditional Toryism of his surroundings by the influence of J. S. Mill and Ruskin, Auberon Herbert was at this moment vehemently republican, and nothing would serve him but to rise and, in supporting this motion purely on the Civil List, to make an avowal of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... was a perfect type of him. Mr. Bennet, when the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have been another perfect type: we can reconstruct him as he was then from the many fragments of his awfulness which still clung to him when the girls had grown up. John Ruskin's father, too, if we read between the lines of Praeterita, seems to have had much of the authentic monster about him. He, however, is disqualified as a type by the fact that he was 'an entirely honest merchant.' ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Colour, remarks Ruskin, is wholly relative; each hue throughout a work is altered by every touch added in other places. Thus, to place white beside a colour is to heighten its tone; to set black beside a colour is to weaken its tone; while to put grey beside a colour, is to render it more brilliant. If a dark ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... little book just come out about children,—'Castle Blair!' ... The book is good, and lovely, and true, having the best description of a noble child in it (Winnie) that I ever read; and nearly the best description of the next best thing,—a noble dog," says John Ruskin, the distinguished art critic. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... connoisseured out of his senses. I shall only, in reference to this last subject, observe that the singularly germinal character of Hazlitt's work is noticeable here also; for no one who reads the essay on Nicolas Poussin will fail to add Mr. Ruskin to Hazlitt's fair herd ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... given by Dante, is so far a proof of less activity of the imaginative faculty. It is easier to leave the devil's stature uncertain than to say that he was eighteen feet high. Without disputing the proposition as Mr. Ruskin puts it, we fancy that he would scarcely take De Foe's poetry as an improvement in dignity upon Milton's. We may, perhaps, guess at its merits from this fragment of a speech in prose, addressed to Adam by Eve: 'What ails the sot?' says the new termagant. 'What are you afraid of?... Take it, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the most learned, are without that desire to look well which makes many a plain face comely, as well as many a pretty one ugly for want of skill and knowledge of the fitness of things. She also took her turn to provide books for the readings, and as art was her forte she gave them selections from Ruskin, Hamerton, and Mrs Jameson, who is never old. Bess read these aloud as her contribution, and Josie took her turn at the romances, poetry, and plays her uncles recommended. Mrs Jo gave little lectures on health, religion, politics, and the various questions in which all should be interested, with ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... rivalry, became a tribute to her indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend's secret annoyance, it even troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, and painfully aware, from Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how entirely men's activities are determined by women's attitudes. And if Hill never by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him with the finer modesty for that omission. So the time came on for the second examination, and Hill's increasing ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... our readers will remember, the remarkable work that Ruskin placed at the head of the best ...
— Max and Maurice - a juvenile history in seven tricks • William [Wilhelm] Busch
... 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, a clearness and directness, a light and pliable ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... 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 grand-ducal ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... who understands the Transfiguration like John Ruskin. He says: "We are afraid to harbour in our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any thought of our Lord as hungering, tired, or sorrowful, or having a human soul, a human will, and affected by the events of human life as a finite creature is: and yet one-half of the ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... Perhaps Ruskin, the great artist-master of word-painting, might have produced as perfect a gem of English description as this. But who besides of our contemporaries has? To my mind, it is the proof of the perfection of the technical skill in expression to which Field arrived through arduous years, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... considerable proportion of the museum's space is devoted to the collection of pictures—some of them copies—which the University has gathered. The interesting Turner water-colours presented by John Ruskin are here, with a Murillo, reputed to be his earliest known work, and a good many other examples of the work of famous men of ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... stories have invested the early Dutch settlers of New York with something like Homeric immortality. A traveler in Spain writes of The Alhambra: "Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has been able to replace it. The tourist reads it within the walls it commemorates as conscientiously as the devout read Ruskin in Florence." [Footnote: Introduction to Pennell's illustrated edition of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... have been the effect of applying to all literature the censorship we still apply to the stage. The works of Linnaeus and the evolutionists of 1790-1830, of Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Helmholtz, Tyndall, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Samuel Butler, would not have been published, as they were all immoral and heretical in the very highest degree, and gave pain to many worthy and pious people. They are at present condemned by the Greek and Roman Catholic censorships as unfit for general reading. A censorship of ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... searches, prophecies, and revelations, is heightened and made efficient by "imagination-penetrative," a thing concerned not with the combining but the apprehending of things. A possession, akin to the power, Ruskin says, all great pictures have, which "depends on the penetration of the imagination into the true nature of the thing represented, and on the scorn of the imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way of its suggestiveness"—a possession ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... youthful studies, botany most attracted him, and that he followed it up as an art pupil in the government schools. But his bent was rather for journalism than for art or science. Before he was twenty-one he had written critical essays for a local newspaper on Ruskin, Carlyle, and Kingsley; and shortly afterward he wrote a series of sketches, after Christopher North, that at this early age gave evidence of his peculiar talent, the artistic use of natural effects in the development of character, the pathos of the gray morning or the melancholy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... grandson Akbar's reign (1560-1605) was India's golden age. Akbar the Great was a ruler of the best modern type, who gave his subjects all the essentials of civilisation. But he knew that material prosperity is only the means to an end. Man, said Ruskin, is an engine whose motive power is the soul; and its fuel is love. Akbar called all the best elements in society to his side and linked them ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... 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 ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... 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 ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... hypothesis, as we said, it is necessary to show that Bacon possessed poetic genius. The proof cannot possibly be found in his prose works. In the prose of Mr. Ruskin there are abundant examples of what many respectable minds regard as poetic qualities. But, if the question arose, 'Was Mr. Ruskin the author of Tennyson's poems?' the answer could be settled, for once, by internal evidence. We have only to look at Mr. Ruskin's published verses. These prove ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... as figured in the waves, CRAWLED over the ground. There was in the image that engraved itself on my memory something cruel—I could not help thinking of the "cruel, crawling foam" and the ruminating pedant Ruskin, and I laughed. "The cruel, crawling snow!" Yes, and in spite of Ruskin and his "Pathetic Fallacy," there it was! Of course, the snow is not cruel. Of course, it merely is propelled by something which, according to Karl Pearson, I do not even with a good scientific conscience dare to call a "force" ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... be anything he chose, and everything by turns. Many of us have been 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. One shudders ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle and every crack in the blade ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... On the supposed difference of symbolism between Greek and Gothic temples (churches) see Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here) were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to hasten to some ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... description, vivacity of retort, energy of criticism, or in riotous and uproarious mirth. De Quincey alone could match the splendor of his diction when describing outward sights and sounds, and De Quincey had not a tithe of his intense love of Nature, and appreciation of her glory and magnificence. Ruskin alone equals him in this, and he scarcely reaches the height of rhetorical eloquence to which Wilson ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... trained eye quickly differentiates, and picks out not only the Song, the Canada, and the Fox Sparrows, but finds a dozen other familiar friends where one who "has eyes and sees not" does not even suspect their presence. Ruskin says: "The more I think of it, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me, that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to SEE something. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... greatest critics, who never carried their creative work to the point of success simply because they had found a better vocation in criticism before reaching such a point. What a loss to the world it would have been had Ruskin developed into a painter, even a great one, instead of the master interpreter and teacher of painting ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... of what can be called Art,—very little indeed. I'm afraid we haven't made much progress in Art.—Now what would Ruskin say to this kind of thing? The popular taste wants educating. My idea is that we ought to get a few leading men Burne Jones and—and William Morris—and people of that kind, you know, Miss. Lord,—to give lectures in a big hall on the elements of Art. A great deal might be done ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... strength to be true to his first beliefs in Wagner's art crusade, and to continue his friendship with the man, though delicacy forbade his entering the home, to which he had regretfully but gracefully resigned his wife, like Ruskin, though not for the same reasons. Once he broke forth in his dilemma: "If he were only some one that I could kill, he would have been dead before this." But he could not interfere with "the great cause," and even Liszt, after some ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... windows of the magnificent south porch? I cannot say in what the charm exactly consists, but this stately Gothic fane has a grandeur as impressive as it is unexpected, recalling those wondrous words of Ruskin's: ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... and, as Matthew Arnold has said, the best results are not attainable without "high seriousness." The difference between the flippant and the earnest writer is easily and instinctively recognized. No one can read Ruskin, for instance, without feeling his sincerity and integrity, even in his most impracticable vagaries. In Addison, Goldsmith, and Irving we find a genial, uplifting amiability; and Whittier, in his deep love of human freedom and justice, appears as a resolute iconoclast ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Ezra, that's one man's opinion. I certainly should not put much faith in one critic, no matter how eminent he may be. Just look at the guide-books and see how the 'authorities' swear at one another. Ruskin says every man is a fool who can't appreciate his particular love, and Burckhardt calls it a daub, and Eastlake insipid. Now, there are a set of young fellows who think they know all about paint and who painted what. They're ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... nervous man or woman may rise to heights that the naturally calm can never reach and can seldom see. To whom do you go for counsel? To the calm, no doubt; but never to the phlegmatic-never to the calm who are calm because they know no better (like the man in Ruskin "to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he does not love it"). You go to the calm who have fought for their calmness, who have known what it is to quiver in every nerve, but have put through whatever they have ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... slowly, "I don't know what Corkran's appreciation of your style may be, but young McTurk reads Ruskin ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling |
