Quotes from John Ruskin

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

The child who desires education will be bettered by it the child who dislikes it disgraced.

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

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

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

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

Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

The foam is not cruel.… The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings… produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic Fallacy."

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

A great thing can only be done by a great person and they do it without effort.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

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 strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.