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John Ruskin Quotes


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No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolish misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual, - coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.
[Man]

O powers illimitable! it is but the outer hem of God's great mantle, our poor stars do gem.

Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

Of all the pulpits from which the human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.

Punishment is the last and least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
[Quality]

Railway travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

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

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or he will certainly misunderstand them.
[Brevity]

Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost Divine in its infinity.


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