Words to Live By...

-- aristotle
"All Thinking Creates Images."

"There is no great Genius without an admixture of madness."

"A is A."

"The Agora should be no larger than the audible space of a shout."

-- balzac
"I Own The World Because I Understand It."

-- ludwig von beethoven
"Music is a higher revelation than Philosophy."

-- william blake
"When the doors of perception are cleansed, things will appear as they truly are."

-- william s. burroughs
"To The Swindlers, There Is One Mark You Cannot Reach, The Mark Inside."

-- cervantes
"The road is always better than the inn."

-- chinese proverb
"Dig The Well Before You Are Thirsty."

-- creole proverb
"Tell me whom you love, and I'll tell you who you are."

-- depeche mode
"If for honesty, you want apologies, I don't sympathize. If for kindness you substitute blindness, please open your eyes."Condemnation

-- albert einstein
"A Hundred Times Every Day, I Remind Myself That My Inner And Outer Life Are Based On The Labors Of Other Men, Living And Dead, And That I Must Exert Myself In Order To Give In The Same Measure As I Have Received."

"To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate made me an authority Myself."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed."

-- ralph waldo emerson
"And why we need copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. "Self-Reliance," Essays

"Genius Borrows Nobly."

"Nothing Is At Last Sacred But The Integrity Of Your Own Mind."

"Whoso Would Be A Man Must Be A Non-Conformist."

"Nothing Can Be Achieved Without Enthusiasm."

"Every Artist was first an amateur."

"It is impossible for a Man to be cheated by anyone but Himself."

"Culture is one thing and varnish is another."

"Culture, with us, ends in headache."

"When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man."

"The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze."

"The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast."

"A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text."

"Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors."

"Where there is no vision a people perish."

"The only reward of virtue is virtue."

-- t.s. eliot
"There is no greater treason than to do the right deed for the wrong reason."

-- robert frost
"Two roads diverge in a wood, and I, I take the one less traveled by."

"Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall."
A Star in a Stone Boat

-- johann wolfgang von goethe
"Nothing is worse than active ignorance."

"Those Who Have Science And Art
Also Have Religion,
But To Those Who Have Neither Science Nor Art
Let Him Have Religion."

-- nathaniel hawthorne
"If cities were built by the sound of music,
then some edifices would appear to be constructed
by grave, solemn tones;
others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs."

-- oliver wendel holmes
"Man's mind, stretched to new ideas, never goes back to it's original dimensions."

-- bruce goff
"The Artist must have a wide vocabulary of digested and assimilated experiences inherited and acquired. He must have an unlimited capacity and range for feeling, an insatiable curiosity and boundless enthusiasm. He must live through all his senses really to experience life and art and to live and work as one - one part of something."

-- john keats
"Such dim conceived glories of the brain."

"Yet 'a gentle luxury to weep."

-- kierkkagard
"If you label me, you negate me."

-- lao tzu
"Thirty spokes will converge in the hub of a wheel;
but the use of the cart,
will depend on the part of the hub that is void.
With a wall all around a clay bowl is molded;
but the use of the bowl,
will depend on the part of the bowl that is void.
Cut out the windows and doors in the House
as you build; but the use of the House,
will depend on the space of the walls that is void.
So advantage is had, from whatever is there;
but usefulness rises, from whatever is not."
Tao Té Ching (The Way of Life), Passage #12

-- stanislaw j. lec
"Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."-

-- anne morrow lindbergh
"When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others."

-- michelangelo
"Never Allow Rules to Restrict your Imagination."

-- john.milton
"What Hath Night To Do With Sleep?"

-- fredrich.wilhelm.nietzsche
"Architecture is Man's will to power by means of form."

"One is punished most for ones virtues."

"In Architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his Will to Power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory power."

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

"All the surplus poetical force that still exists in modern humanity, but is not used under our conditions of life, should without and deduction be devoted to a definite goal- not depicting the present nor reviving and summarizing the past, but to pointing the way to the future..."

-- bart prince
"Architecture is a sculptural biography."

-- elmer rice
"Art is meant to strike us with Reality, not allow us to hide from it."

-- john ruskin
"We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness; first, doing their practical duty; then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it."
The Seven Lamps of Architecture

"Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond it's common use."

"An Architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him out to our hills, and let him study there what Nature understands by a butress, and what by a dome."

"When we build, let us think that we build forever."

-- carl sandberg
"I am an Idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."

-- william shakespeare
"And As Imagination Bodies Forth,
The Forms Of Things Unknown,
The Poets Pen Turns Them To Shapes
And Brings To Airy Nothing,
A Local Habitation And A Name."
A Midsummer Nights Dream

"Life Is A Tale Told By An Idiot
Full Of Sound And Fury,
Signifying Nothing."
Hamlet

"Kill All The Lawyers."
Hamlet

"For what does it profit a Man
if he gains the whole world,
but loses his Soul?"
Hamlet

"When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot,
then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the House,
Then we must rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
in fewer offices,
or at least desist To build at all?."
Henry IV, Act 2

"Self Love Is No Greater A Sin Than Self Neglect."
Henry V, Act 1

-- shelley
"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

-- socrates
"Know Thyself."

"The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living."

"I drank what?!"

"All I Know, Is That I know Nothing."

-- robert louis stevenson
"Since the world is so full of a number of things,
we must categorize and simplify in order to comprehend.
But the reduction of complexity entails a great danger,
since the line between enlightening epitome
and vulgarized distortion is so fine."

-- alfred lord tennyson
"My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset."

-- dylan thomas
"Dusk is drowned forever til tomorrow."

"Sweet as a razor."
Under Milkwood

-- henry david thoreau
"Live deep and suck out the marrow of life."

"The problem with majority rule is that the majority is not always correct."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

"Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one."

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away."

"Public opinion is a weak tyrant, compared with our private opinion-what a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates his fate."

"That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess."

"I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision."
Walden or Life in the Woods

-- mies.van.der.rohe
"Greek temples, Roman basilicas and medieval cathedrals
are significant to us as creations of a whole epoch rather than as works of individual architects.
Who asks the names of these builders?
Of what significance are the fortuitous personalities of their creators?
Such buildings are impersonal by their very nature.
They are pure expressions of their time."

-- voltaire
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

"Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road."

"History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead."

-- william.butler.yeats
"It was a lonely invention of desire."

-- walt whitman
"Resist Much; Obey Little."

"That you are here;
that Life exists and Identity;
that the powerful play goes on,
and You may contribute a verse."

"The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual."

-- oscar wilde
"No Great Artist Ever Sees Things The Way They Really Are.
If He Did, He Would Cease To Be An Artist."

"Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious or giving your life away to the ignorant or the common...
...LIVE!
Live the wonderful life that is in you."

-- derrick wolcott
"A culture is made by it's cities."

-- frank lloyd wright
"Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you've got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is."

"Five lines where three are enough is always stupidity. Nine pounds where three are sufficient is obesity. But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing, words that intensify or vivify meaning is not simplicity. Nor is similar elimination in Architecture simplicity; it may be, and usually is, stupidity"
An Autobiography, 1932

"The solution of every problem is contained within itself. Its plan, form and character are determined by the nature of the site, the nature of the materials used, the nature of the system using them, the nature of the life concerned and the purpose of the building itself."

"Architectural values are Human values or they are not valuable."
The Disappearing City, 1927

"No house should ever be on any hillŠ it should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together, each the happier for the other."

"Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way."

"No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. It was no more than what he felt. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built. His philosophy, true or false, is there."


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