John Ruskin Quotes
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Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
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The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves ... also Makes Them Most Serviceable to Others.
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Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.
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Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
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Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.
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People are always expecting to get peace in heaven: but you know whatever peace they get there will be ready-made. Whatever making of peace they can be blest for, must be on the earth here.
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However good you may be you have faults; however dull you may be you can find out what some of them are, and however slight they may be you had better make some - not too painful, but patient efforts to get rid of them.
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Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection.
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What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end.
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A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
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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.
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All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
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To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.
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And remember, child, that nothing is ever done beautifully, which is done in rivalship; or nobly, which is done in pride.
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Do justice to your brother, 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.
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God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it.
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The spirit needs several sorts of food of which knowledge is only one.
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The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.
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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.
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When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work.
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One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.
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See! This our fathers did for us.
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I desire ... to leave this one great fact clearly stated. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.
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Sky is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.