John Ruskin Quotations | Page 5

Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.

In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge

It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend.

Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work, his life is a happy one.

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.

It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

The last act crowns the play.

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.