John Ruskin Quotes

When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage

Why did becoming accustomed to something have to render its pleasures stale.

I've been here for 19 years, so West Ham fans are bored with seeing me. It's like my wife, who changes the wallpaper every three years because she gets tired of it.

Familiarity breeds content.

I got used to being a writer. To compare it to teaching - I taught for twenty-five years; for the first two or three years it was heady. I was discovering that I could do something and do it well. Be useful to people. It was exhilarating, sort of like the first two weeks of being in love with somebody, and then it becomes like the third bite of pizza. The first bite is wonderful. The second bite is not disappointing. The third? Meh. You get used to it.

A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.

Reading will give you lasting pleasure.

Everything becomes too normal after a while.

Once a person stops searching for information and self-knowledge, ignorance sets in.

What gives you pleasure and joy? Let those be the things that lead you forward in life.

I was in Rome this time for about three or four months, and I feel like, by the time I left, every single person in Rome had seen me at least 10 times riding my bicycle. When I first got there, it seemed like people were happy to see me and would say hello. And by the end, they were kind of bored of seeing me. And it was like, "Ugh, there he goes again".

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.

Only in sex the noise sometimes stops. I say "sometimes". If you have become habitual in sex also, as husbands and wives become, then it never stops. The whole act becomes automatic and the mind goes on its own. Then sex also is a boredom.

There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

I've learned what works and what doesn't, which gives me confidence.

If I had a choice, if I had understood earlier that the reason my days were all the same was because I wanted them like that, perhaps.

The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for things it sees all the time.

Talk about the joys of the unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be?

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.

When you think you know it all, there's not much that you'll learn.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

When you sing the same song over and over and over again, it stops meaning what it originally meant to you. It starts sounding like white noise, or my washing machine.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.