Quotes from John Ruskin

The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.

Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.

The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.

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.

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

Human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now Men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or were ever slugs, being practically no matter.

If you want to work for the kingdom of God, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.

Which of us?is to do the hard and dirty work for the restand for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

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.

Never has interest in art been so high, and never has quality been so low.

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

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

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

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.

Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.

Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.

Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.

The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.