John Ruskin

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

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.

Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

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.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

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.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

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

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

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.

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.

He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.

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.