John Ruskin

Give a little to love a child, and you get a great deal back

All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality

The best work never was and never will be done for money.

Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it.

Spiritual power begins by directing animal power to other than egoistic ends.

What is the cheapest to you now is likely to be the dearest to you in the end.

The last act crowns the play.

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.

It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men.

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.

Your labor only may be sold, your soul must not.

The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.

It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.

Freedom is only granted us that obedience may be more perfect.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.