John Ruskin quotes:

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

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.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.

No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

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.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

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.

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 person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

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.

I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

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.

A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

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.

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.

Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.

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.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

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.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

One of the major obstacles impeding any positive future change in our lives is that we are too busy with our current work or activity. Levi quit his tax-work, Peter stopped fishing at lake, Paul ceased being a priest. They all left their jobs because they thought it was necessary.

And whether consciously or not, you must be in many a heart enthroned: queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter of womanhood.

Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

All the best things and treasures of this world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snow-ball, higher and higher, larger and larger, along the Alps of human power.

To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.

There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.

He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

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.

Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates.

Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade.

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

Let every dawn of the morning be to you as the beginning of life. And let every setting of the sun be to you as its close. Then let everyone of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others; some good strength of knowledge gained for yourself.

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.

Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.

If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.

Blue color is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.

Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.

People cannot live by lending money to one another.

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.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than anything else.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms and spices... It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat.

The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form.

It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death which is set upon the whole figure. It is, in every way, perfect--truth itself, but truth selected with inconceivable refinement of feeling.

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.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.

Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship. Quality also marks the search for an ideal after necessity has been satisfied and mere usefulness achieved.

It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.

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.

... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)

All real and wholesome enjoyments possible to people have been just as possible to them since first they were made of the earth as they are now; and they are possible to them chiefly in peace. To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over plowshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope: these are the things that make people happy.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

Come, ye cold winds, at January's call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.

Society has sacrificed its virtues to the Goddess of Getting Along.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.

No amount of pay ever made a good soldier, a good teacher, a good artist, or a good workman.

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.