John Ruskin Quotes
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It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching.
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The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.
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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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Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.
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You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
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All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.
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There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.
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There is no wealth but life.
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Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
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No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
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There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.
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And with respect to the mode in which these general principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I from invalidating such security, that the whole gist of these papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its range; and 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.
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Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
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Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself -my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness -darkness -bitter mockery of herself -is the most desolating.
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Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.
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Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.
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Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.
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Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, they injure it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence.
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You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
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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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Hope- the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached here after.
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It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
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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.
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If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.