Top 450 John Ruskin Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?”

— John Ruskin

102. “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.”

— John Ruskin

103. “Whether for life or death, do your own work well.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

105. “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.”

— John Ruskin

106. “Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.”

— John Ruskin

107. “Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.”

— John Ruskin

108. “This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.”

— John Ruskin

109. “All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.”

— John Ruskin

110. “Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.”

— John Ruskin

111. “If some people really see angels where others see only empty space, let them paint the angels: only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

113. “Of all God’s gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.”

— John Ruskin

114. “The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.”

— John Ruskin

115. “He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

117. “What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.”

— John Ruskin

118. “The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.”

— John Ruskin

119. “All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.”

— John Ruskin

120. “To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.”

— John Ruskin

121. “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

122. “Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.”

— John Ruskin

123. “The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.”

— John Ruskin

124. “A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.”

— John Ruskin

125. “In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.”

— John Ruskin

126. “Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

128. “Ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.”

— John Ruskin

129. “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.”

— John Ruskin

130. “On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.”

— John Ruskin

131. “The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.”

— John Ruskin

132. “That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin.”

— John Ruskin

133. “The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.”

— John Ruskin

134. “No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.”

— John Ruskin

135. “To watch the corn grow, or the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over the plough or spade; to read, to think, to love, to pray are the things that make men happy.”

— John Ruskin

136. “No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.”

— John Ruskin

137. “All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be effort, and the law of human judgment, mercy.”

— John Ruskin

138. “He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

140. “Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

142. “God alone can finish.”

— John Ruskin

143. “Occult Theft, – Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly, – corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists.”

— John Ruskin

144. “You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased with them, or too grasping to care for what you can not turn to other account than mere delight.”

— John Ruskin

145. “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.”

— John Ruskin

146. “There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

149. “All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.”

— John Ruskin

150. “Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel- pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternityof nothing wasthe deadliest.”

— John Ruskin