Quote: A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort. [John Ruskin]
Quote: We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind. [John Ruskin]
Quote: One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live. [John Ruskin]
Quote: I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Civilization is the making of civil persons. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook. [John Ruskin]
Quote: The root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian Church has suffered, has been because of the effort of men to earn, rather than receive their salvation; and the reason preaching is so commonly ineffective is, that it often calls on people to work for God rather than letting God work through them. [John Ruskin]
Quote: A book worth reading is worth buying. [John Ruskin]
Quote: You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Men cannot not live by exchanging articles, but producing them. They live by work not trade. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time. [John Ruskin]
Quote: One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right. [John Ruskin]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work. [John Ruskin]
Quote: People cannot live by lending money to one another. [John Ruskin]
Quote: How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it? [John Ruskin]
Quote: When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package. [John Ruskin]
Quote: They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change. [John Ruskin]
Quote: To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions. [John Ruskin]
Quote: If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only. [John Ruskin]
Quote: Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not. [John Ruskin]
Quote: It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have... insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled. [John Ruskin]
Quote: 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. [John Ruskin]