No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
— John Ruskin
The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
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.
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?
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
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.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
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.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.
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.
A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
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.
Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
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.
The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.
To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.
There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
Whether for life or death, do your own work well.
No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
