John Ruskin Quotes

Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.

John Ruskin · The source reads: “Taste… is the only morality.… Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.” · The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), lecture 2

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

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

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

Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it.

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

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.

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

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

There is no wealth but life.

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

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

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

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

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

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

Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

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

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

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

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