Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin, "The Origin of German Tragic Drama"

Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone ; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, See ! This our fathers did for us.

John Ruskin, "The seven lamps of architecture"

Not merely because the one is by reason of its ruin more picturesque than the other, but because it is a nobler act in man to meditate upon Fate as it conquers his work, than upon that work itself.

John Ruskin, "The Harbours of England”

In architecture, the superinduced and accidental beauty is most commonly inconsistent with the preservation of original character, and the picturesque is therefore sought in ruin, and supposed to consist in decay. Whereas, even when so sought, it consists in the mere sublimity of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation, which assimilate the architecture with the work of Nature, and bestow upon it those circumstances of colour and form which are universally beloved by the eye of man.

John Ruskin, "The seven lamps of architecture"

Of that feeling which results from the influence among the noble lines of architecture, of the rent and the rust, the fissure, the lichen, and the weed, and from the writing upon the pages of ancient walls of the confused hieroglyphics of human history.

John Ruskin, "Modern Painters, Vol I"

It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture.

John Ruskin, "The seven lamps of architecture"