Top 450 John Ruskin Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.”

— John Ruskin

202. “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”

— John Ruskin

203. “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

204. “In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.”

— John Ruskin

205. “It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.”

— John Ruskin

206. “It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”

— John Ruskin

207. “Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone.”

— John Ruskin

208. “We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!”

— John Ruskin

209. “In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.”

— John Ruskin

210. “Morality does not depend on religion.”

— John Ruskin

211. “Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.”

— John Ruskin

212. “The last act crowns the play.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

214. “You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.”

— John Ruskin

215. “Success by the laws of competition signifies a victory over others by obtaining the direction and profits of their work. This is the real source of all great riches.”

— John Ruskin

216. “I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.”

— John Ruskin

217. “He who is not actively kind is cruel!”

— John Ruskin

218. “A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.”

— John Ruskin

219. “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

220. “Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.”

— John Ruskin

221. “It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.”

— John Ruskin

222. “Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

224. “Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.”

— John Ruskin

225. “The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.”

— John Ruskin

226. “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.”

— John Ruskin

227. “Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.”

— John Ruskin

228. “Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death: only little men do that.”

— John Ruskin

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

— John Ruskin

230. “A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.”

— John Ruskin

231. “The object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy them.”

— John Ruskin

232. “Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.”

— John Ruskin

233. “There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.”

— John Ruskin

234. “It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.”

— John Ruskin

235. “The highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language, and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its dependency of language or expression.”

— John Ruskin

236. “It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.”

— John Ruskin

237. “A man never stood so tall as when he stooped to help a child.”

— John Ruskin

238. “Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.”

— John Ruskin

239. “No day is without its innocent hope.”

— John Ruskin

240. “It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.”

— John Ruskin

241. “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?”

— John Ruskin

242. “A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.”

— John Ruskin

243. “A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.”

— John Ruskin

244. “Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.”

— John Ruskin

245. “In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.”

— John Ruskin

246. “Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.”

— John Ruskin

247. “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”

— John Ruskin

248. “You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.”

— John Ruskin

249. “If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God’s work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.”

— John Ruskin

250. “You do not see with the lens of the eye. You seen through that, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye.”

— John Ruskin