Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Books
The anger of a person who is strong, can always bide its time.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Anger
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
—John Ruskin
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Slavery
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Slavery
Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people
—John Ruskin
Topics: Art, Inheritance
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.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Giving
Obey something, and you will have a chance to learn what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying the devil and all his invited friends.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Obedience
Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Children
He is only advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, his blood warmer, his brain quicker, and his spirit entering into living peace.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Progress
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.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Ability
Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health, as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom, there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Cheerfulness, Happiness
Poetry is the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions
—John Ruskin
Topics: Poetry
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.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt
Life is a magic vase filled to the brim; so made that you cannot dip into it nor draw from it; but it overflows into the hand that drops treasures into it – drop in malice and it overflows hate; drop in charity and it overflows love.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Life
The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Nature
The best work never was and never will be done for money.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Work
Anything that makes religion a second object makes it no object.—He who offers to God a second place offers him no place.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Religion
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Possessions, Property
Do not let us lie at all. Do not think of one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another as unintended. Cast them all aside; they may be light and accidental, but they are ugly soot from the smoke of the pit, and it is better that our hearts should be swept clean of them, without one care as to which is largest or blackest.
—John Ruskin
The buckling on of the knight’s armor by his lady’s hand was not a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth that the soul’s armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it, and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Woman
You will find it less easy to uproot faults, than to choke them by gaining virtues.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Faults
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
—John Ruskin
It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Labor
No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or agreement; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin,—victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Peace
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Art
Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Labor, Fortune
If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples—temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Home
I have been more and more convinced, the more I think of it, that, in general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. All the other passions do occasional good; but whenever pride puts in its word, everything goes wrong; and what it might really be desirable to do, quietly and innocently, it is mortally dangerous to do proudly.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Pride
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
—John Ruskin
Topics: Science
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- John Churton Collins British Literary Critic
- William Ernest Henley British Poet, Critic
- Jeremy Collier English Anglican Clergyman
- F. L. Lucas English Literary Critic
- Coventry Patmore English Writer
- George Lois American Advertising Executive
- Russell Lynes American Historian, Writer
- Bernard Berenson American Art Critic
- George Henry Lewes English Philosopher
- Bernard Mandeville British Writer
Leave a Reply