Quotes By John Ruskin

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

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.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

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

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

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.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

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.

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

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