John Ruskin Quotes

To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.

Obey something, and you will have a chance to learn what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying the devil and all his invited friends.

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.

Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven forever in the work of the world.

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.

So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

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

There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.

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.

One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right.

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

The best work never was and never will be done for money.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

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.

There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.

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

People cannot live by lending money to one another.

The object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy them

The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.

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

There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.

He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.

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

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

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.

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

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

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

And remember, child, that nothing is ever done beautifully, which is done in rivalship; or nobly, which is done in pride.

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

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

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

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.

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

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.

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?

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.