3 John Ruskin Quotes on Culture

John Ruskin quotes on culture

7. 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.

15. In great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to keep them children.

59. 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?