It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled. – John Ruskin
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. – John Ruskin
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it. – John Ruskin
Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. – John Ruskin
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. – Henry David Thoreau