John Ruskin Quotes

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Man’s writing has but one true sense, which is that which the Author meant when he writ it.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.

Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.