Quotes from John Ruskin

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy.Bothyourreligionand policy must be basedon it.

If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.

Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.

Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.

Once thoroughly our own, the knowledge ceases to give us pleasure.

The spirit needs several sorts of food of which knowledge is only one.

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

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.

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.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.

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

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.

The Bible is the one Book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.