John Ruskin Quotes
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Order and system are nobler things than power.
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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.
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Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
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We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.
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Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.
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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.
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Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man.
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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.
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Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
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Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.
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Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.
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The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.
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If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.
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Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
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Ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.
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The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.
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Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.
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Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.
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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.
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In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.
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No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.
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A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
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You cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath as a narcissus will if you do not give her air enough; she might fall and defile her head in dust if you leave her without help at some moments in her life; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her own fair form and way if she take any.
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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.