Quotes by Ruskin, John

"Spiritual power begins by directing animal power to other than egoistic ends."

Ruskin, John on spirituality
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"Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it."

Ruskin, John on status   

"It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls."

Ruskin, John on submission   

"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it."

Ruskin, John on success
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"If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength."

Ruskin, John on success
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"Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches."

Ruskin, John on success   

"No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort."

Ruskin, John on ability
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"The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition."

Ruskin, John on ability
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"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."

Ruskin, John on ability
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Nothing can be beautiful which is not true."

Ruskin, John on beauty
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"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance."

Ruskin, John on beauty
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"A book worth reading is worth buying."

Ruskin, John on books - reading
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"You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement."

Ruskin, John on books - reading
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"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours."

Ruskin, John on books - reading   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time."

Ruskin, John on books - reading
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"How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?"

Ruskin, John on books - reading   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions."

Ruskin, John on books - reading   

"People cannot live by lending money to one another."

Ruskin, John on borrowing   

"One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right."

Ruskin, John on change   

"They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change."

Ruskin, John on change   

"The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work."

Ruskin, John on charity   

"To watch the corn grow, or the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over the plough or spade; to read, to think, to love, to pray, are the things that make men happy."

Ruskin, John on cheerfulness   

"No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others."

Ruskin, John on taxes and taxation   

"In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them."

Ruskin, John on technology   

"Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions."

Ruskin, John on trade unions   

"Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates."

Ruskin, John on trains   

"Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, the laws of death."

Ruskin, John on unity   

"The best thing in life aren't things."

Ruskin, John on value
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"The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain."

Ruskin, John on vanity
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"The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him."

Ruskin, John on vulgarity   

"What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant well-being, and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money."

Ruskin, John on wealth   

"Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."

Ruskin, John on weather   

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."

Ruskin, John on weather
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"The best work never was and never will be done for money."

Ruskin, John on work
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"It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them. "

Ruskin, John on writers and writing   

"The distinctive character of a child is to always live in the tangible present."

Ruskin, John on children
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"In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children."

Ruskin, John on children   

"Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections."

Ruskin, John on children   

"Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook."

Ruskin, John on churches   

"The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them."

Ruskin, John on churches
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