Top 617 Quotes & Sayings by John Ruskin
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer John Ruskin.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
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.
A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
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.
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.
Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
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.
Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
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.
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.
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.
There is no wealth but life.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
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.
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.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
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.
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
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.
The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
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.
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.
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.
A book worth reading is worth buying.
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.
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.
Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.
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