Failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of a thing actually to be done; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfection in themselves.

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture »