John Ruskin

“ Alas, this is not by any means the notion of the St. George’s Company. It is to be a band of delivering [80] knights—not of churls needing deliverance; of eager givers and servants—not of eager beggars,1 and persons needing service. It is only the Rich, and the Strong, whom I receive for Companions,—those who come not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Rich, yet some of them in other kind of riches than the world’s; strong, yet some in other than the world’s strength. But this much at least of literal wealth and strength they must have,—the power, and formed habit, of self-support. ”

“ And little enough mind have I for any work, in this seventy-seventh year that’s coming of our glorious century, wider than I could find in the compass of my cockle-shell.
But alas! my prudent friends, little enough of all that I have a mind to may be permitted me. For this green tide that eddies by my threshold is full of floating corpses, and I must leave my dinner to bury them, since I cannot save; and put my cockle-shell in cap, and take my staff in hand, to seek an unincumbered shore. ”

“ It is natural for you to think your own house and garden the nicest house and garden that ever were. If, as should always be, they were your father’s before you, and he and you have both taken proper care of them, they are a treasure to you which no money could buy,—the leaving them is always pain,—the return to them, a new thrill and wakening to life. ”

“ I pause, without writing ‘everlasting,’ as perhaps you expected. Neither Carpaccio nor I know anything about Duration of life, or what the word translated ‘everlasting’ means. Nay, the first sign of noble trust in God and man, is to be able to act without any such hope. All the heroic deeds, all the purely unselfish passions of our existence, depend on our being able to live, if need be, through the Shadow of Death: and the daily heroism of simply brave men consists in fronting and accepting Death as such, trusting that what their Maker decrees for them shall be well. ”

“ Neither when we esteem beauty of body more than beauty of soul, for nothing born of the Earth is more honourable than what is born of Heaven; and he who thinks so of his soul knows not that he is despising his marvellous possession: neither when one desires to obtain money in any dishonourable way, or having so obtained it, is not indignant and unhappy [329] therefore—does he honour his soul with gifts; far otherwise; he has given away the glory and honour of it for a spangle of gold; and all the gold that is on the earth, and under the earth, is not a price for virtue. ”

“ To me it seems that the good of you (as you say it) is that you have a heart to feel the sorrows of the world—that you have courage and power to speak against injustice and falsehood, and more than all, that you act out what you say. Everybody else seems asleep or dead—wrapped up in their own comfort or satisfaction,—and utterly deaf to any appeal. ”

“ Ryman’s shop here in Oxford; nor am I entirely at ease, at this moment, in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner; yet my readers may trust me when I tell them, that in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon; and of Peter—not Simon—the tanner, whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest. ”

“ Thus Communism achieves through friendship and freedom that which the Old World secures only through a system little better than slavery.
“In the interest of art and the cultivation of the beautiful, Communism again supplies the place of a hereditary aristocracy and a wealthy church. A Community family, unlike the ephemeral households of ordinary society, is a permanent thing. Its edifice is not liable to be sold at the end of every generation, but like a cathedral descends by unbroken inheritance. ”

“ But the harlots have another kind of capital which you, my blind practical friend, don’t call ‘Property’; but which I, having the use of my eyes as well as of my hands, do. They have beauty of body;—many of them, also, wit of mind. And on these two articles of property, you observe, my friend, being much more their own, and much more valuable things, if they knew it, than china and timepieces—on these they [318] do make an annual income, and turn them over, as you call it, several times perhaps in the year. ”

“ That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! ”

“ Suppose each one who has a garden felt it to be her duty to make all her scholars as familiar with all the life in it as she is herself, and every one who can take a country walk her duty to take her girls with her—two or three at a time—until they know and love every plant within reach; would not teacher and pupils learn with this much more that would also be invaluable?10 And if our Sunday-school children were not left to killing flies and stoning cats and dogs during the week, would there be so many brutal murders and violent assaults? ”

“ Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. ”

“ Whatever is committed to it remains, and is the care of the society from century to century. With a home thus established, all the members of a Community are at once interested to gather about it objects of art. It becomes a picture-gallery and a museum, by the natural accretion of time, and by the zeal of persons who know that every embellishment added to their home will not only be a pleasure to them personally, but will remain to associate them with the pleasure of future beholders in all time to come. ”

“ With those whom you know to be honest, know to be innocent, know to be striving, with main purpose, to serve mankind and honour their God, you are humbly and lovingly to associate yourselves: and with none others.
“You don’t like to set yourself up for being better than other people? You dare not judge harshly of your fellow-creatures?”
I do not tell you to judge them. I only tell you not to dine with them, and not to deal with them. That they lose the pleasure of your company, or the profit on your custom, is no crushing punishment. To their own Master they stand or fall ”

“ George’s Company is now distinctly in existence; formed of about twenty accepted Companions, to whose number I am daily adding, and to whom the entire property of the Company legally belongs, and who have the right at any moment to depose the Master, and dispose of the property in any manner they may think fit. Unless I believed myself capable of choosing persons for Companions who might be safely entrusted with this power I should not have endeavoured to form the society at all. ”

“ The despairing letter from Yorkshire in last ‘Fors’—on their incapacity to enjoy wholesome amusements—has prompted me, as I am writing to you, to tell you this as an antidote to the pain that letter must have given you. For if we can do nothing for this generation, cannot we make sure that the next shall be wiser? Have not young ladies a mighty power in their own hands here, if they but use it for good, and especially those who are Sabbath-school teachers? ”

“ George’s law is the same for grown-up people as for little ones. To hold all they have,—all their grown-up things,—for God, and never to mind losing anything,—silver or gold, house or lands, son or daughter;—law seldom so much as even attempted to be observed! ”

“ But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.
On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field, [150] still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”
Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. ”

“ The civilized mob spends the money forthwith, in gunpowder, infernal machines, masquerade dresses, new boulevards, or anything else it has set its idiotic mind on for the moment; and appoints its money-collecting machine to collect a daily tax from its children, and children’s children, to be paid to the capitalists from whom it had received the accommodation, thenceforward for ever.
That is the nature of a National Debt.
In order to understand that of a National Store, my readers must first consider what any store whatever, serviceable to human beings, consists of. ”

“ I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.
The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. ”

“ And who follows Him shall go to rejoice in His Fatherland and in His Kingdom.”
Then she turned to her people: “My sisters and my brothers, in this place God has given us great grace. Embrace and make it sure, for our death in this place will be life perpetual, and joy, and sweetness never-ending. And there, above, we shall be with the Majesty and the angels of Paradise.” Then she called her spouse to comfort and teach him. And he answered her with these words, “To me it appears three thousand years that death is a-coming, so much have I already tasted of the sweetness of Paradise.” ”

“ Thou shalt take no usury of him, nor anything over and above, and thou shalt fear thy God. I am the Lord, and thy brother shall live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money, for usury; and thou shalt not give him thy food, for increase.”
There is the simple law for all of us;—one of those which Christ assuredly came not to destroy, but to fulfil: and there is no national prosperity to be had but in obedience to it.
How we usurers are to live, with the hope of our gains gone, is precisely the old temple of Diana question. ”

“ Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell them why they are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” ”

“ Covetousness. The desire of possessing more than we have, of any good thing whatsoever of which we have already enough for our uses, (adding house to house, and field to field) . It is much connected with pride; but more with restlessness of mind and desire of novelty; much seen in children who tire of their toys and want new ones. The pleasure in having things ‘for one’s very own’ is a very subtle element in it. When I gave away my Loire series of Turner drawings to Oxford, I thought I was rational enough to enjoy them as much in the University gallery as in my own study. ”

“ Paul’s command to all Christians living, “Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy,”—is an important little commandment following the two great ones, I cannot tell you in a single letter, even if I altogether knew myself. Partly I do know;—and can teach you, if you will work. No one can teach you anything worth learning but through manual labour; the very bread of life can only be got out of the chaff of it by “rubbing it in your hands.” ”

“ Perhaps the thing of most importance in the education of the common people is to prevent the intrusion of artificial wants. I bless the memory of my father for almost everything in the dispositions of my mind and the habits of my life, which I can approve of, and for none more than the pains he took to impress my mind with the sentiment that nothing was more unworthy the character of a man than that his happiness should in the least depend on what he should eat and drink. ”

“ If you teach him only to reason, you may make him an atheist, a demagogue, or any vile thing; but if you teach him to feel, his feelings can only find their proper and natural relief in devotion and religious resignation. I can say from my own experience that there is no sort of farm labour inconsistent with the most refined and pleasurable state of the mind, that I am acquainted with, threshing alone excepted. That, indeed, I have always considered insupportable drudgery, and think the man who invented the threshing-machine ought to have a statue among the benefactors of his country. ”

“ I fear that few modern readers of Dante understand the dreadful meaning of this hellish outer district, or suburb, full of the refuse or worthless scum of Humanity—such numbers that “non haverei creduto, che morte tanta n’ havesse disfatta,”—who are stung to bloody torture by insects, and whose blood and tears together—the best that human souls can give—are sucked up, on the hell-ground, by worms. ”

“ We, of the so-called ‘educated’ classes, who take it upon us to be the better and upper part of the world, cannot possibly understand our relations to the rest better than we may where actual life may be seen in front of its Shakespearean image, from the stalls of a theatre. I never stand up to rest myself, and look round the house, without renewal of wonder how the crowd in the pit, and shilling gallery, allow us of the boxes and stalls to keep our places! ”