"Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it"
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Doing is the great thing because will and habit educate the heart as surely as they train the hand. Ruskin asserts a reversal of the popular sequence between feeling and action: do not wait to feel inspired to do what is right; do what is right, and the feeling will follow. The discipline of repeated right action slowly reshapes appetite, so that duty ripens into desire. This is the logic of virtue as habit, where the self is formed by what it repeatedly practices, not by what it intermittently wishes.
The line sits naturally within Ruskin's larger Victorian project. As an art and social critic, he preached the moral significance of work and craft, insisting that beauty and justice arise from honest labor performed with care. In defending Gothic architecture, he praised the small deviations and marks of handwork because they revealed living, conscientious effort. Likewise in his economic writings, he condemned systems that divorced labor from moral purpose. To do the right work, steadily and with integrity, was to cultivate both character and taste; the craft educates the craftsman.
Psychology now describes a similar mechanism as behavioral activation: action precedes motivation. Ruskin pushes this beyond mood management into ethics. Doing right is not merely a technique but a training of love. What begins as obedience becomes affinity; the thing once difficult becomes natural, even pleasurable. That promise carries a caution too. If action shapes affection, then wrongful habits can educate us to love what harms. The compass must be right before the will sets to work.
There is nothing passive here. Resoluteness matters. One chooses, not drifts, into the practice that reforms desire. In an age that tells people to follow their passion, Ruskin offers a sterner mercy: follow your duty, and your passion will learn to follow you.
The line sits naturally within Ruskin's larger Victorian project. As an art and social critic, he preached the moral significance of work and craft, insisting that beauty and justice arise from honest labor performed with care. In defending Gothic architecture, he praised the small deviations and marks of handwork because they revealed living, conscientious effort. Likewise in his economic writings, he condemned systems that divorced labor from moral purpose. To do the right work, steadily and with integrity, was to cultivate both character and taste; the craft educates the craftsman.
Psychology now describes a similar mechanism as behavioral activation: action precedes motivation. Ruskin pushes this beyond mood management into ethics. Doing right is not merely a technique but a training of love. What begins as obedience becomes affinity; the thing once difficult becomes natural, even pleasurable. That promise carries a caution too. If action shapes affection, then wrongful habits can educate us to love what harms. The compass must be right before the will sets to work.
There is nothing passive here. Resoluteness matters. One chooses, not drifts, into the practice that reforms desire. In an age that tells people to follow their passion, Ruskin offers a sterner mercy: follow your duty, and your passion will learn to follow you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Habits |
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