Quotes by John Ruskin
In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
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.
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
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.
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
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 good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
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.
Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
As a camel beareth labor, and heat, and hunger, and thirst, through deserts of sand, and fainteth not; so the fortitude of a man shall sustain him through all perils.
