Explore Quotes by John Ruskin

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

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

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.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

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

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

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

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.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty

Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.

I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

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.

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.

Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.