Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.

Ruskin contrasts two moral failures: idleness and dehumanized labor. “Life without industry” treats a person’s capacities as wasted, implying a kind of ethical debt to use one’s powers in service, work, and responsibility. But “industry without art” warns that mere productivity—work stripped of imagination, beauty, and humane purpose—can become “brutality,” reducing workers to instruments and making society coarse. The aphorism encapsulates Ruskin’s broader critique of industrial capitalism: he valued work that cultivates the whole person and insisted that aesthetic and moral education should shape economic life, not be an afterthought.