John Ruskin

“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.”

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

“Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.”

“The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.”

“All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.”

“When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.”

“There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.”

“It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.”

“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”

“I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.”

“I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.”

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

“It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty.”

“Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.”

“It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.”

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

“Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.”

“There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.”

“No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.”

“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.”