John Ruskin

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some intellectual intention.

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself - my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness - darkness - bitter mockery of herself - is the most desolating.

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourself to any influence that will bring upon you any noble feeling.

Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?

It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.

Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.

There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.