Quotes By John Ruskin

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.