John Ruskin

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

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

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

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

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

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.

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.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

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

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

Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.

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.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.