John Ruskin Quotes

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

It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.

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

To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

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

The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.

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

All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

And whether consciously or not, you must be in many a heart enthroned: queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter of womanhood.

Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

There is no wealth but life.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.