Explore Quotes by John Ruskin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 false knight or lying priest ever prospered, I believe, in any age, but certainly not in the dark ones. Men prospered then, only in following openly-declared purposes , and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.

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

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.

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

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

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

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

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

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

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

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

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