John Ruskin Quotes
Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.
Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.
Human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now Men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or were ever slugs, being practically no matter.
The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.
What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
If you want to work for the kingdom of God, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.
This is the true nature of home - it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.
Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.
To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty
If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.
Do justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him because you don't love him, and you will come to hate him.
Ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.
Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.
All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.
Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.
Whenever I did anything wrong, stupid or hard-hearted, and I have done many things that were all three, my mother always said "it is because you were too much indulged."
At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them.
One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.
The man who says to one, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.
The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.
The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.
I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
The artist's business is to feel, although he may think a little sometimes... when he has nothing better to do.
Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.
Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.
It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.
Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.