John Ruskin
To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.
Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.Collection: Confused
It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.Collection: Motivational
Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship. Quality also marks the search for an ideal after necessity has been satisfied and mere usefulness achieved.Collection: Wise
What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we doCollection: Motivational
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.Collection: Appreciation
No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.Collection: Rain
Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.Collection: Heart
All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.Collection: Real
When we build ... let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think ... that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!Collection: Father
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.Collection: Simple
People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.Collection: Class
The best thing in life aren't things.Collection: Life
I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.Collection: Believe
It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.Collection: Life
One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.Collection: Anger
The best work never was and never will be done for money.Collection: Work
The true end of education is not only to make the young learned, but to make them love learning; not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry; not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue; not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.Collection: Education
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.Collection: Thinking
In mortals there is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity, and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from dulness and mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base.Collection: Care
No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.Collection: Men
True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.Collection: Reading
So long as we see the stones and joints, and are not deceived as to the points of support in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise than regret the dexterous artifices which compel us to feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in its branches.Collection: Regret
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.Collection: Men
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.Collection: Positive
The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.Collection: Selfish
Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.Collection: Birthday
God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.Collection: Happiness
The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.Collection: Nature
Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.Collection: Bible
Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.Collection: Perfect
He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.Collection: Heart
He who offers God a second place offers Him no place.Collection: Idolatry
Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.Collection: Work
Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force.Collection: Architecture
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.Collection: Cadence
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible..... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.Collection: Stars
There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.Collection: Age
Work first, and then rest.Collection: Work