John Ruskin
English art critic and social thinker, 1819-1900
70 quotes.
Quotes by John Ruskin
- A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
- A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
- All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
- An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.
- Be sure you can obey good laws before you seek to alter bad ones.
- Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
- Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up.
- Degrees infinite of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a gift also to his race for ever.
- Do not think of your faults; still less of others' faults: in every person who comes near you, look for what is good and strong: honour that; rejoice in it; and, as you can, try to imitate it.
- Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
- Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best of them. The training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.
- Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
- Every duty which we omit, obscures some truth which we should have known.
- Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven for ever in the work of the world.
- Every youth, from the king's son downwards, should learn to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand.
- For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it.
- Genius is only a superior power of seeing.
- God intends no man to live in this world without working; but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.
- God never imposes a duty without giving the time to do it.
- God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that he will not put up with in it, —a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers him no place.
- He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, and whose spirit is entering into living peace.
- He who offers God a second place offers Him no place.
- Home is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.
- Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.
- Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.
- I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility.
- If a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; but it is in that kind of ease with which a tree blossoms after long years of gathered strength.
- If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. So you will have calm days, drowsy nights, and all the good business you have now, and none of the bad.
- If you resolve to do right, you will soon do wisely; but resolve only to do wisely, and you will never do right.
- In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
- In reverence is the chief joy and power of life.
- It is better to be nobly remembered, than nobly born.
- It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.
- It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and ease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately.
- It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.
- It is no man's business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work will always be the things that God meant him to do, and will be his best.
- It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy.
- It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.
- Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
- Living without an aim, is like sailing without a compass.