John Ruskin - Work Quotes

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The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

John Ruskin
The true work of a critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him.

John Ruskin
If you want to work for the kingdom of God, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.

John Ruskin
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

John Ruskin
No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.

John Ruskin
How to keep unwanted visitors away:
Mr J. Ruskin is about to begin a work of great importance and therefore begs that in reference to calls and correspondence you will consider him dead for the next two months.

John Ruskin
"The work of men" — and what is that? Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of being wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for the most part thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we are to get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it is a mortal one — we want to keep back part of the price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm in a cross was the weight of it — as if it was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be — crucified upon. "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts."

John Ruskin
Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money, — he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. "What will you make of what you have got?" you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.

John Ruskin
Human work must be done thoroughly and honourably because we are now men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter.

John Ruskin
The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

John Ruskin
But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work.

John Ruskin
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

John Ruskin
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

John Ruskin
Perhaps the first question which an intelligent child would think of asking about a tree: "Mamma, how does it make its trunk?", and you may open one botanical work after another, and good ones too, and by sensible men - you shall not find this child's question fairly put, much less fairly answered.

John Ruskin
The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.

John Ruskin
He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

John Ruskin
Which of us…is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest, and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?

John Ruskin
Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect in its own bad way.

John Ruskin
If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

John Ruskin
When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;—when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly.

John Ruskin
I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work. By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be chosen. The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.

John Ruskin
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.

John Ruskin
In no art is there closer connection between our delight in the work, and our admiration of the workman's mind, than in architecture, and yet we rarely ask for a builder's name.

John Ruskin
God intends no man to live in this world without working, but it seems to me no less evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work.

John Ruskin
And besides; the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question remains inexorable, —Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest, and for what pay?

John Ruskin
In all base schools of art, the craftsman is dependent for his bread on originality; that is to say, on finding in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, by which his work may be distinct from that of other men. We are ready enough to take delight in our little doings, without any such stimulus; — what must be the effect of the popular applause which continually suggests that the little thing we can separately do is as excellent as it is singular; and what the effect of the bribe, held out to us through the whole of life, to produce — it being also in our peril not to produce — something different from the work of our neighbors?

John Ruskin
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?

John Ruskin
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

John Ruskin
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.

John Ruskin
No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

John Ruskin