Notable quotes

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths [...] I would spread the cloths under your feet: but I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 ~ William Butler Yeats

"Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination and to memory."

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Those that don't have it, can't show it. Those that have it can't hide it."
~ Zora Neale Hurston

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." ~ Martin Luther King, jr.

"I find that spending too much time planning things eventually leads to disaster." ~ Melanie Watts

"I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work." ~ Thomas Edison, sort of

"To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees."
 ~ Paul Valéry

"God is in the details."

~ Mies van der Rohe

"Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."

~ Edward Tufte

"If we are going to make a mark, it may as well be a meaningful one. The simplest - and most useful - meaningful mark is a digit."

~ John Tukey

"The past is approached as a substitute for missing convictions about the future."

~ Steven Kent Peterson

"Whereas immature reflection tends to judge by usefulness alone, a discriminating mind may ask its share of beauty"
 ~ Bernard Rudofsky

"The popular notion that subjectivity, poetry, and art are welcome in the private domains of the gallery or the library but are no match for the power of 'rational' instrumentality in 'solving' the real problems of the world is to understand these problems in terms that are somehow external to the world of symbolic communication and cultural values."*
 ~ James Corner

"I cultivate a very healthy level of insecurity... It’s better that I’m running scared and hungry, still on the hunt and trying to invent."
 ~ Frank Gehry

“(1) Works of art have little or no finality, being manifestations of process. (2) Every building has many authors. (3) The idea of style is only a convenient verbalism. Process and sequence are more relevant.” - Yale professor George Kubler, addressing architecture majors, advising them to “unlearn” some fundamental premises in the conventional history of their discipline (as cited by Gwendolyn Wright)

"For no choice can exist without motive. Men are both revealed and betrayed by their acts. For men’s acts show forth their inmost thoughts—no matter what their speech may be. Man can create solely in the image of his thought; for thoughts are living things—words may dissemble. In men’s acts alone is the reality of their thought to be sought and found—there is no hiding place secure against the tracking searcher."

 ~ Louis Sullivan

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." ~ Dr. Seuss "Proceed and be bold."

~ Samuel Mockbee

"...language, the agent of expression, is also the hotbed of ambiguity." ~ Spiro Kostoff "Truth is more likely to come from error than from confusion." ~ Francis Bacon

"They would not find me changed from him they knew --

Only more sure of all I thought was true."

 ~ Robert Frost