John Ruskin

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

— John Ruskin

Every great man is always being helped by everybody; for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

— John Ruskin

The anger of a person who is strong, can always bide its time.

— John Ruskin

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

— John Ruskin

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

— John Ruskin

We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!

— John Ruskin

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

— John Ruskin

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

— John Ruskin

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

— John Ruskin

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

— John Ruskin

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

— John Ruskin

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

— John Ruskin

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

— John Ruskin

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.

— John Ruskin

A book worth reading is worth buying.

— John Ruskin

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

People cannot live by lending money to one another.

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

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.

— John Ruskin

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

— John Ruskin

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

— John Ruskin

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

— John Ruskin

Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

— John Ruskin

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

— John Ruskin

We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.

— John Ruskin

Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.

— John Ruskin

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

— John Ruskin

Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

— John Ruskin

Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.

— John Ruskin

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

— John Ruskin

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

— John Ruskin

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

— John Ruskin

When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.

— John Ruskin

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

— John Ruskin

Out of suffering comes the serious mind; out of salvation, the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance faith.

— John Ruskin

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

— John Ruskin

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.

— John Ruskin

Freedom is only granted us that obedience may be more perfect.

— John Ruskin

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.

— John Ruskin

You cannot get anything out of nature or from God by gambling; only out of your neighbor.

— John Ruskin

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.

— John Ruskin

Give little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

— John Ruskin

It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.

— John Ruskin

A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.

— John Ruskin

Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.

— John Ruskin

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have... insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

— John Ruskin

If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.

— John Ruskin

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

— John Ruskin

Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.

— John Ruskin

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

— John Ruskin

It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.

— John Ruskin

The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.

— John Ruskin

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

— John Ruskin

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

— John Ruskin

Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.

— John Ruskin

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.

— John Ruskin

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men.

— John Ruskin

Once thoroughly our own knowledge ceases to give us pleasure.

— John Ruskin

It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men --broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.

— John Ruskin

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.

— John Ruskin

It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.

— John Ruskin

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.

— John Ruskin

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

— John Ruskin

No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.

— John Ruskin

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

— John Ruskin

There is no wealth but life.

— John Ruskin

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

— John Ruskin

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.

— John Ruskin

Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.

— John Ruskin

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

— John Ruskin

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts -- the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

— John Ruskin

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.

— John Ruskin

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself --my disgust at her barbarity --clumsiness --darkness --bitter mockery of herself --is the most desolating.

— John Ruskin

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

— John Ruskin

Obey something, and you will have a chance to learn what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying the devil and all his invited friends.

— John Ruskin

In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

— John Ruskin

You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.

— John Ruskin

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser, and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

— John Ruskin

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

— John Ruskin

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

— John Ruskin

The last act crowns the play.

— John Ruskin

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

— John Ruskin

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

— John Ruskin

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

— John Ruskin

What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end.

— John Ruskin

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

— John Ruskin

It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.

— John Ruskin