"One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live."
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John Ruskin quotes (page 16 of 31)
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"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."
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"Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base."
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"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."
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"You cannot get anything out of nature or from God by gambling; only out of your neighbor."
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"Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart."
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"God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it."
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"Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future."
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"Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions."
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"There is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour, in which nature does not exhibit color which no mortal effort can imitate or approach. For all our artificial pigments are, even when seen under the same circumstances, dead and lightless beside her living color; nature exhibits her hues under an intensity of sunlight which trebles their brilliancy."
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"Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance."
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"It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty."
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"Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts."
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"One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty."
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"There's no music in rest, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody, always talking of perseverance and courage and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too."
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"Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions."
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"The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by 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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"Civilization is the making of civil persons."
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"How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty."
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