John Ruskin
Variety is a positive requisite even in the character of our food.Collection: Character
They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.Collection: Love
We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.Collection: Offending
Not without design does God write the music of our lives.Collection: Music
What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end.Collection: Quality
Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.Collection: Expression
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.Collection: Book
The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.Collection: Flower
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.Collection: Music
The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.Collection: Love
On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.Collection: Patience
The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.Collection: Greatness
Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.Collection: Inspirational
When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts.Collection: Heart
To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.Collection: Clever
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.Collection: Jesus
Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close: — then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others — some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourselves.Collection: Morning
It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.Collection: Pride
Genius is only a superior power of seeing.Collection: Genius
Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven forever in the work of the world.Collection: Life
He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.Collection: Life
To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.Collection: Expression
All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.Collection: Art
I know well that happiness is in little things.Collection: Littles
No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.Collection: Happiness
There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.Collection: Strong
Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.Collection: Sympathy
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.Collection: Greatness
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.Collection: Change
A man is known to his dog by the smell, to his tailor by the coat, to his friend by the smile; each of these know him, but how little or how much depends on the dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed characteristic of the man is known only to God.Collection: Dog
He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth they, and they only.Collection: Kings
A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.Collection: Wise
When God shuts a door, He opens a window.Collection: Doors
It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me the most to learn, and which was to my childish mind the most repulsive - Psalm 119 - has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God.Collection: Mother
Living without an aim, is like sailing without a compass.Collection: Sailing
The greatest reward is not what we receive for our labor, but what we become by it.Collection: Rewards
We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.Collection: Heart
If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.Collection: Law
There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.Collection: Flower
The Bible is the one Book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.Collection: Bible
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.Collection: Imperfection
Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it.Collection: Fit
The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.Collection: Sea
Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.Collection: Time
He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.Collection: Sarcastic
I desire ... to leave this one great fact clearly stated. THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.Collection: Desire
In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.Collection: Spiritual
All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.Collection: Dull
All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.Collection: Beautiful