100 Quotes by John Ruskin
John Ruskin, a Victorian-era writer, art critic, and social thinker, left an indelible mark on the fields of art and aesthetics, as well as social reform. Born in 1819, Ruskin's writings covered a wide range of topics, from art and architecture to political economy and environmental conservation. His work as an art critic, notably in "Modern Painters," elevated the status of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and emphasized the importance of art's connection to nature and moral values. Ruskin's views on architecture, encapsulated in works like "The Stones of Venice," called for a return to craftsmanship, incorporating beauty and utility. Beyond aesthetics, Ruskin's social writings, including "Unto This Last," critiqued the harsh realities of industrialization, advocating for a more humane and equitable society. His ideas influenced figures like Mahatma Gandhi and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Ruskin's multidisciplinary approach to thought and his ability to bridge the realms of art and society make him a pivotal figure in the evolution of cultural and social discourse.
John Ruskin Quotes
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece. (Meaning)
The best thing in life aren't things. (Meaning)
One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin. (Meaning)
I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility. (Meaning)
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words. (Meaning)
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness. (Meaning)
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty. (Meaning)
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately. (Meaning)
I know well that happiness is in little things. (Meaning)
There is no wealth but life. (Meaning)
When God shuts a door, He opens a window. (Meaning)
When we build, let us think that we build forever. (Meaning)
A book worth reading is worth buying. (Meaning)
To do your own work well, whether it be for life or death. (Meaning)
Nothing can be beautiful which is not true. (Meaning)
Not without design does God write the music of our lives. (Meaning)
Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not. (Meaning)
See! This our fathers did for us. (Meaning)
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. (Meaning)
Morality does not depend on religion. (Meaning)
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. (Meaning)
The last act crowns the play. (Meaning)
God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it. (Meaning)
No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. (Meaning)
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.
Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship. Quality also marks the search for an ideal after necessity has been satisfied and mere usefulness achieved.
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.
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
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.
What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do
There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
Blue color is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.
There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.
When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts.
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm - we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish - ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.
Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.
In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.
When we build ... let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think ... that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!
I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.
Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
The true end of education is not only to make the young learned, but to make them love learning; not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry; not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue; not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.
To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.
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.
No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
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.
One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.
The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.
No girl who is well bred, 'kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart.
To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.
When we build, let us think that we build forever.
Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close: — then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others — some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves.
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.
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.
The Bible is the one Book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
There is no wealth but life.
Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.
A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.
Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. None of us knows what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought-proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure houses of precious and restful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
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.
A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
God gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault.
I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.
Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.
The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.
We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
A man is one whose body has been trained to be the ready servant of his mind; whose passions are trained to be the servants of his will; who enjoys the beautiful, loves truth, hates wrong, loves to do good, and respects others as himself.
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.
The best thing in life aren't things.
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.
Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him.
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.
He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
Living without an aim, is like sailing without a compass.
All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.
You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.
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.
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
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.
The best work never was and never will be done for money.
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
Every noble life leaves the fiber of it interwoven forever in the work of the world.
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.
Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
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.
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.
The whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge--conscious, rather of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him.
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.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.
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.
Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the places where he wishes us to be employed. He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough and sense enough for what he wants us to do.
I know well that happiness is in little things.
"The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves ... also Makes Them Most Serviceable to Others"
Genius is only a superior power of seeing.
He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.
"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."
In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.
We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.
In our whole life melody the music is broken off here and there by rests, and we foolishly think we have come to the end of time. God sends a time of forced leisure, a time of sickness and disappointed plans, and makes a sudden pause in the hymns of our lives, and we lament that our voice must be silent and our part missing in the music which ever goes up to the ear of our Creator. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the time and not be dismayed at the rests. If we look up, God will beat the time for us.
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
Humanity and Immortality consist neither in reason, nor in love; not in the body, nor in the animation of the heart of it, nor in the thoughts and stirrings of the brain of it;--but in the dedication of them all to Him who will raise them up at the last day.
What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant well-being, and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money.
The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.
No one can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.
You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required--and content that He should indeed require no more of you--than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.
The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.
The only way to understand these difficult parts of the Bible, or even to approach them with safety, is first to read and obey the easy ones.
The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.
The greatest reward is not what we receive for our labor, but what we become by it.
Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the time, and not be discouraged at the rests. If we say sadly to ourselves, "There is no music in a rest," let us not forget " there is the making of music in it." The making of music is often a slow and painful process in this life. How patiently God works to teach us! How long He waits for us to learn the lesson!
A man is known to his dog by the smell, to his tailor by the coat, to his friend by the smile; each of these know him, but how little or how much depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man is known only to God.
If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth they, and they only.
The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
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.
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.
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.
It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me the most to learn, and which was to my childish mind the most repulsive - Psalm 119 - has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.
Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
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."
Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any. Nothing is visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes. Standing within all is clear and defined; every ray of light reveals an army of unspeakable splendors.
Order and system are nobler things than power.
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.
All men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped; they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest, is he who has been oftenest aided. Originality is the observing eye.
Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.
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.
― John Ruskin Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
