Quotes by John Ruskin

“We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other a...”

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

“All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.”

“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”

“For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.”

“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing y...”

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

“To be taught to readwhat is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speakbut what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To...”

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

“You can only possess beauty through understanding it.”

“And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools...”

“the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,not the first thought that comes, so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,not the first passion that comes. The first that come ...”

“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.”

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

“It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ...”

“Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we mo...”

“There is no wealth but life.”

“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.”