John Ruskin's Appeal To Our Better Angels

We occasionally run across pithy quotes from John Ruskin(1819-1900), the Victorian essayist. The final paragraph below may be familiar to a number of readers. Like so many Victorians (such as Dickens and MacDonald) the language sounds flowery and archaic to our post-Hemingway, media-saturated world. It's worth the effort to dig through and learn the rhythm of Ruskin's verbal craft.

The words preceding that famous quote deserve consideration: What would our culture look like if these words guided our behavior?


'The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practicing present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendents may live under their shade, of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was within our power to bequeath.

Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.'


From The Seven Lamps of Architecture: The Lamp of Memory