Top 450 John Ruskin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.”

— John Ruskin

52. “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, the laws of death.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

54. “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.”

— John Ruskin

55. “Architecture is the work of nations.”

— John Ruskin

56. “Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.”

— John Ruskin

57. “You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.”

— John Ruskin

58. “Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.”

— John Ruskin

59. “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.”

— John Ruskin

60. “Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.”

— John Ruskin

61. “Sky is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.”

— John Ruskin

62. “All of one’s life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.”

— John Ruskin

63. “The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

65. “He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth they, and they only.”

— John Ruskin

66. “Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.”

— John Ruskin

67. “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

70. “God gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for everything He wants us to do.”

— John Ruskin

71. “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.”

— John Ruskin

72. “Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

74. “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.”

— John Ruskin

75. “All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of “virtue” is that straightness of back.”

— John Ruskin

76. “The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

78. “Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.”

— John Ruskin

79. “The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.”

— John Ruskin

80. “A man is one whose body has been trained to be the ready servant of his mind; whose passions are trained to be the servants of his will; who enjoys the beautiful, loves truth, hates wrong, loves to do good, and respects others as himself.”

— John Ruskin

81. “There are many religions, but there is only one morality.”

— John Ruskin

82. “We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

84. “Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing, which if you destroy, you make yourself cold and dull.”

— John Ruskin

85. “He who offers God a second place offers Him no place.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

87. “God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it – a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.”

— John Ruskin

88. “Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.”

— John Ruskin

89. “We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.”

— John Ruskin

90. “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.”

— John Ruskin

91. “I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.”

— John Ruskin

92. “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

— John Ruskin

93. “When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

95. “Not without design does God write the music of our lives.”

— John Ruskin

96. “The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don’t mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.”

— John Ruskin

97. “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.”

— John Ruskin

98. “Come, ye cold winds, at January’s call, On whistling wings, and with white flakes bestrew The earth.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

100. “The actual flower is the plant’s highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.”

— John Ruskin