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All the other passions do occasional good, but whenever pride puts in its word, everything goes wrong, and what it might really be desirable to do, quietly and innocently, it is mortally dangerous to do, proudly.

John Ruskin

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John Ruskin
Age: 80 †
Born: 1819
Born: February 8
Died: 1900
Died: January 20
Aesthetician
Architect
Art Critic
Art Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Kata Phusin
Rŏsŭkʻin
J. Ruskin
John Rosukin
Jon Rasukin
Dzhon Rëskin
Ruskin
Wrong
Passions
Might
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Everything
Whenever
Mortally
Really
Pride
Innocently
Good
Goes
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Dangerous
Occasional
Passion
Quietly
Word
Desirable

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If you want knowledge, you must toil for it if food, you must toil for it and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
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[For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.
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I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
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I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
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He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.
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He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.
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It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.
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The constant duty of every man to his fellows is to ascertain his own powers and special gifts, and to strengthen them for the help of others.
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In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.
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Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.
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The man who says to one, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.
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No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.
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I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.
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Like other beautiful things in this world, its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.
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All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
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It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.
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It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things by help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.
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A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
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Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.
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Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect in its own bad way.
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