Cheap is not good and good is not cheap

I was discarding some old papers and came across the following quote by John Ruskin. It is well work keeping in mind as you shop around for all manner of items, including log homes and timber frame homes. He wrote:

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It’s unwise to pay too much . . . but it’s worse to play too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money . . . that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot -- it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better . . . by John Ruskin

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A few more quotes by John Ruskin [1819 - 1900], British author, essayist, critic

- There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.

- In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.

- Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

- The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.

- What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

- When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

- You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.

- In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

- We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.

- Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.