770 Quotes by John Ruskin

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 laborers Unions.

It is among children, and as children only, that you will find your healing and true wisdom for your teaching.

As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime.

As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary; a wild flower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by bread only.

Whenever I did anything wrong, stupid or hard-hearted, and I have done many things that were all three, my mother always said “it is because you were too much indulged.”

Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary’s study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier’s face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.

What is really desired, under the name of riches, is, essentially, power over men; in its simplest sense, the power of obtaining for own own advantage the labour of servant, tradesman, and artist; in wider sense, authority of directing large masses of the nation to various ends.

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