John Ruskin

So far, therefore, as the science of exchange relates to the advantage of one of the exchanging persons only, it is founded on the ignorance or incapacity of the opposite person. . . . It is therefore a science founded on nescience. . . . This science, alone of sciences, must, by all available means, promulgate and prolong its opposite nescience. . . . It is therefore peculiarly and alone science of darkness.

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

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

Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.

To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty

He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.

It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense.

Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; _ talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, _ kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! _ in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, _ we make no account of that company, _ perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!

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.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.

It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better.

All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.

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