According to Ruskin scholar George P. Landow, there is no evidence that this quotation or its variants can be found in any of Ruskin's works.
[Landow, George P., A Ruskin Quotation?, VictorianWeb.org, 2007-07-27, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/quotation.html, 2013-01-07]
Disputed
“How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little.”
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist
Letter to Rev. W. H. Channing (31 December 1843) quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 184.
John Donne (1572–1631) English poet
IV. Mediscque Vocatur The physician is sent for
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
Enoch Fitch Burr (1818–1907) American astronomer
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 608.
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
Non qui parum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper est.
Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter II: On discursiveness in reading, Line 6.
Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America
Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter VII : "It's Just Like Living", p. 162
“No man's more fortunate than he who's poor,
Since for the worse his fortune cannot change.”
Diphilus Athenian poet of New Comedy
Fragment 23
Fabulae Incertae
Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman
Letter to Edmund Burke (24 January 1779), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 41.
1770s
“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist
Source: The Cornel West Reader
