84 quotes
Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.
Childhood (1913)
It is for fear of the grown-up, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?"
Childhood (1913)
[R]ight language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.
The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1893)
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
The Spirit of Place and Other Essays (1899)
[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual.
John Ruskin (1900)
[T]here is nothing so exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful student.
John Ruskin (1900)
O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise
In the young children's eyes.
But I have learnt the years, and know the yet
Leaf-folded violet.
Preludes (1875)
I am dark but fair,
Black but fair.
Poems (1893)
A poet of one mood in all my lays,
Ranging all life to sing my only love,
Like a west wind across the world I move,
Sweeping my harp of floods mine own wild way.
Poems (1893)
But, visiting Sea, your love doth press
And reach in further than you know,
And fills all these, and when you go,
There's loneliness in loneliness.
Poems (1893)
The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.
The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)
Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them; it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds.
The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)
[T]he sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.
Ceres' Runaway and Other Essays (1909)
[W]hat is now and then attempted is perhaps "for art's sake." He that saveth his art shall lose it.
Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912)
[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art.
Children of the Old Masters (Italian School) (1903)
[I]t would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.
Ceres' Runaway and Other Essays (1909)
[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.
The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (1921)
[T]here is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal.
The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1893)
She walks—the lady of my delight—
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She guards them from the steep;
She feeds them on the fragrant height,
And folds them in for sleep.
Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind's eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote.
The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (1921)