John Ruskin Quotes
The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.
Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
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.
A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.
I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
God gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault.
Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.
Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.
The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.
All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
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.
All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be effort, and the law of human judgment, mercy.
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.
Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.
The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
