To watch the corn grow, or the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over the plough or spade; to read, to think, to love, to pray, are the things that m… - John Ruskin

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies — loaf givers.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

You may trust to the truth of my sympathy; but you must remember that I am engaged in the investigation of enormous religious and moral questions, in the history of nations; and that your feelings, or my own, or anybody else's, at any particular moment, are of very little interest to me, — not from want of sympathy, but from the small proportion the individuality bears to the whole subject of my enquiry.