John Ruskin Quotes

“The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

“Cookery means ... English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.”

— John Ruskin

“The best thing in life aren't things.”

— John Ruskin

“It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.”

— John Ruskin

“Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.”

— John Ruskin

You may trust to the truth of my sympathy; but you must remember that I am engaged in the investigation of enormous religious and moral questions, in the history of nations; and that your feelings, or my own, or anybody else's, at any particular moment, are of very little interest to me,
not from want of sympathy, but from the small proportion the individuality bears to the whole subject of my enquiry.

— John Ruskin

“As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary; a wild flower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by bread only.”

— John Ruskin

“A man never stood so tall as when he stooped to help a child.”

— John Ruskin

“Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.”

— John Ruskin

“Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

“No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.”

— John Ruskin

“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.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

“Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.”

— John Ruskin

Don't just look at buildings ... watch them.

— John Ruskin

“Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.”

— John Ruskin

Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves trees enough, and everyone is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.

— John Ruskin

“Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.”

— John Ruskin

“Candlesticks and incense not being portable into the maintop, the sailor perceives these decorations to be, on the whole, inessential to a maintop mass. Sails must be set and cables bent, be it never so strict a saint's day; and it is found that no harm comes of it. Absolution on a lee-shore must be had of the breakers, it appears, if at all; and they give plenary and brief without listening to confession.”

— John Ruskin

“Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers.”

— John Ruskin

“Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.”

— John Ruskin

In my house there is no attempt whatever to secure harmonies of colour, or form, or furniture ... I am entirely independent for daily happiness upon the sensual qualities of form or colour-when I want them I take them either from the sky or from the fields.

— John Ruskin

If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.

— John Ruskin

“Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.”

— John Ruskin

“Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.”

— John Ruskin

“It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.”

— John Ruskin

“Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,
coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.”

— John Ruskin

“Courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the mark of a gentleman or a lady; but it becomes vulgar if rude or insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a characteristic of race or fineness of make. A fawn is not vulgar in being timid, nor a crocodile "gentle" because courageous.”

— John Ruskin

If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.

— John Ruskin

“There is a certain period of the soul-culture when it begins to interfere with some of characters of typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring of the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its way out to heaven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel; and there is, in this indication of subduing the mortal by the immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range than that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul than of, the fair and ruddy countenance of David.”

— John Ruskin

“It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.”

— John Ruskin

“Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.”

— John Ruskin

“Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.”

— John Ruskin

“When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower; when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.”

— John Ruskin

“That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin”

— John Ruskin

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.

— John Ruskin

“The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.”

— John Ruskin

Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes no places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition.

— John Ruskin

“Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.”

— John Ruskin

“Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

“The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.”

— John Ruskin

“Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes man happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.”

— John Ruskin

“English artists are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy.”

— John Ruskin

“It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods," "ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact , out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.”

— John Ruskin

“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.”

— John Ruskin

“Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.”

— John Ruskin

“God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it.”

— John Ruskin