Quotes By John Ruskin

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.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

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.

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?

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

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.

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.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

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.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

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.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

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

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.

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.

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.