Quotes By John Ruskin

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.

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

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.

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.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

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.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

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.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

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

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?

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

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

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

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

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.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

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.