Quotes By 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.

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

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

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

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

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

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

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

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

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

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

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

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

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

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.

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

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

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

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

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

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

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

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.