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"It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building."
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"The eye is the jewel of the body."

"The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books."

"Purposefully look for something beautiful today."

"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."

"As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead."

"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."

"I've alway found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect."

"Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul."
Explore more quotes by John Ruskin

"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?"

"Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor."

"Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them."

"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better."

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art."

"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."

"Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one shape."

"Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel."
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