Quotes from John Ruskin

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.

Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men.

There was always more in the world than men 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.

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.

The Training which Makes Men Happiest in themselves ... also Makes Them Most Serviceable to Others

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and there are busy poor and busy rich.... in a large view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working class — strong and happy — among both rich and poor; there is an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich and poor.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

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

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

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

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the "superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

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.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven forever in the work of the world.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Architecture is the work of nations

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.

There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.

One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.