Quotes from John Ruskin

You will find it less easy to unroot faults than to choke them by gaining virtues. 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; honor that; rejoice in it and as you can, try to imitate it; and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.

What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

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.

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

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

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

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

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

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.

The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.

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.

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.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.

All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree not of a cloud.

He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.