John Ruskin
The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities.Collection: Ignorance
Do justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him because you don't love him, and you will come to hate him.Collection: Brother
The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.Collection: Believe
No one can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.Collection: Hope
Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.Collection: Inspirational
Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.Collection: Errors
If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.Collection: Success
Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.Collection: Life
When we build, let us think that we build forever.Collection: Badass
The only way to understand these difficult parts of the Bible, or even to approach them with safety, is first to read and obey the easy ones.Collection: Way
But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work.Collection: Kings
You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.Collection: Cute
No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or argument; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin--victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts.Collection: Peace
The object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy themCollection: People
I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.Collection: Greatness
You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required--and content that He should indeed require no more of you--than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.Collection: Peace
It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.Collection: Art
Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.Collection: God
But if, indeed, there be a nobler life in us than in these strangely moving atoms; if, indeed, there is an eternal difference between the fire which inhabits them, and that which animates us,--it must be shown, by each of us in his appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in the activity of our hope, not merely by our desire, but our labor, for the time when the dust of the generations of men shall be confirmed for foundations of the gates of the city of God.Collection: Moving
The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.Collection: Art
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruinCollection: May
Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.Collection: Heart
Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organiation than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities.Collection: Encouragement
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.Collection: Real
I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.Collection: Children
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.Collection: Reading
There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.Collection: Differences
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.Collection: Power
Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.Collection: Political
Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.Collection: Science
It is, indeed, right that we should look for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the coming of the day of God; but not that we should check any human effort by anticipations of its approach. We shall hasten it best by endeavoring to work out the tasks that are appointed for us here; and, therefore, reasoning as if the world were to continue under its existing dispensation, and the powers which have just been granted to us were to be continued through myriads of future ages.Collection: Lying
All of one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly, and in time.Collection: Life Is
Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing, which if you destroy, you make yourself cold and dull.Collection: Knowing
Courage, so far as it is a sign of race, is peculiarly the mark of a gentleman or a lady; but it becomes vulgar if rude or insensitive, while timidity is not vulgar, if it be a characteristic of race or fineness of make. A fawn is not vulgar in being timid, nor a crocodile "gentle" because courageous.Collection: Courage
When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work.Collection: Men
Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.Collection: Art
You cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath as a narcissus will if you do not give her air enough; she might fall and defile her head in dust if you leave her without help at some moments in her life; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her own fair form and way if she take any.Collection: Girl
Repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite,--energy.Collection: Opposites
You may sell your work, but not your soul.Collection: Soul
The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance.Collection: Eye
To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penaltyCollection: Speak
In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.Collection: Work
Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.Collection: Hurt
Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.Collection: Inspirational
Men say their pinnacles point to heaven. Why, so does every tree that buds, and every bird that rises as it sings. Men say their aisles are good for worship. Why, so is every mountain glen and rough sea-shore. But this they have of distinct and indisputable glory,--that their mighty walls were never raised, and never shall be, but by men who love and aid each other in their weakness.Collection: Wall
We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.Collection: Passion
Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces.Collection: Flower
Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.Collection: Art
I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions... Nor has the Church's ardent "desire to depart, and be with Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure.Collection: Christian