John Ruskin Quotes

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

The relative majesty of buildings depends more on the weight and vigour of their masses than any other tribute of their design.

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

The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.

When love and skill work together, expect a materpiece.

The scholar is early acquainted with every department of the impossible.

The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.

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

It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.

Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.

To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin

The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.

It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

Work first, and then rest.

Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.

We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.

A man never stood so tall as when he stooped to help a child.

In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out.

Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.

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

Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.

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

I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.

Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing, which if you destroy, you make yourself cold and dull.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

When God shuts a door, He opens a window.

Morality does not depend on religion.

All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.

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.

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

He who is not actively kind is cruel!

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.

In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

You may sell your work, but not your soul.

Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.

I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.

The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.

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

You shall have thousands of gold pieces; - thousands of thousands - millions - mountains of gold: where will you keep them?

There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.

The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.

There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.

Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.

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

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.

God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it.

Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.

What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.

There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.

Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.

A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.

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

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.

Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy.Bothyourreligionand policy must be basedon it.

Always stand by form against force.

Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

Order and system are nobler things than power.

To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty

Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.

Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.

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

Beautiful art can only be produced by people who have beautiful things about them.

There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.

We are, after all, only trustees of the wealth we possess. Without the community and its resources ... there would be little wealth for anyone.

One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.

I used to lie down on the grass and draw the blades as they grew - until every square foot of meadow, or mossy bank, became a possession to me.

The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.

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

As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.

I know well that happiness is in little things.

If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it.

It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.

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

In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.

We are only advancing in life, whose hearts are getting softer, our blood warmer, our brains quicker, and our spirits entering into living peace.

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.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

A book worth reading is worth owning.

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

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