John Ruskin Quotes

Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he's got iron teeth.

L.A. is a very strange place. On the surface, it has an innocent appearance, like the stranger with the pleasant face that smiles and shakes your hand. But then you learn it is actually a lot less nice than you think, and there's a whole deeper, darker level.

We read on the foreheads of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury, that fortune sells what she is thought to give.

You know if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks, I could also give you the illusion of prosperity.

You can tell when someone on TV who's supposed to be struggling to pay back loans is clearly wearing a Gucci suit or tailored to perfection.

Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.

If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.

Whenever money is in the game, it can suffocate anything and anyone else, and I think people have been misled by money, or the dream of money, or selling the dream that if you've made it money-wise, you've made a life. Which is a lie. You don't get happiness by money.

So the life I have made May seem wrong to you But, I've never been surer It's my life to ruin My own way.

A politician who enters public life may as well face the fact that the best way of not being found out is not to do anything which, if found out, will cause his ruin.

Circumstances may appear to wreck our lives and God’s plans, but God is not helpless among the ruins.

To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face

Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.

Henceforth ye may thieve with better knowledge whence lucre should be won, and learn that it is not well to love gain from every source. For thou wilt find that ill-gotten pelf brings more men to ruin than to weal.

Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Always scorn appearances and you always may.

The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.

It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich.

In things which we know, everyone will trust us ... and we may do as we please, and no one will like to interfere with us; and we are free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall turn them to our good.

Sometimes you think you've found love, when it's really just one of those objects that are shiny in a certain light--a trophy, say, or a ring, or a diamond, even. Glass shards, maybe. You've got to be careful, you do. The shine can blind you. The edges can cut you in way you never imagined. It is up to you to allow that or not.

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

I'm a very private person, regardless of what the world may think of me.

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.