John Ruskin

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.

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

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts--the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.

Taste is the only morality.... Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this—that we manufacture everything there except men.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

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 imperfection ... raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

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.

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

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

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

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

Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it. Your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night.

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.

There is no wealth but life.

Soldiers of the ploughshare as well as soldiers of the sword.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

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

Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

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

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 Labourers' Unions.

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

There are no such things as Flowers—there are only gladdened Leaves.

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.

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.

It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

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.

Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

The higher a man stands, the more the word "vulgar" becomes unintelligible to him.

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.

He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.

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 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."

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labour which its possessor will take in exchange for it.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?