John Ruskin Quotes
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There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.
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... no human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice.
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If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.
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Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
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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.
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We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: - the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, - the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.
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To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
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I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
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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.
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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.
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Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
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Whether for life or death, do your own work well.
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There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.
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I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)
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No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.
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Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.
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No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
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There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
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The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.
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There is but one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or wrong? If right, it most assuredly is not a 'free' line, but an intensely continent, restrained and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as 'free' as the hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision.
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God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.
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..the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.
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Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.
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I know well that happiness is in little things.