John Ruskin Quotes (219 Quotes)

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.

Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work.

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.

Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourself to any influence that will bring upon you any noble feeling.

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

What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end.

Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches.

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

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

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

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

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

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

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.

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.

All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it

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.

On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.

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

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

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.

You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and most delicate ways, improve yourself.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

The highest reward for a mans toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

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

Freedom is only granted us that obedience may be more perfect.

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

The last act crowns the play.

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.

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

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

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.

Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done.

Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them.