“It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”

Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.

As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church’s role in losing people.

I’d really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it’s the wrong century.

The nationalism and the protectionism that was built into the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and that characterized the Mexican attitude to the United States for much of the 20th century were difficult to overcome. But that actually has occurred. And the cooperation.

If we remain determined to shape a new and better world of separate, sovereign nations, this new century will be a happier one.

As a result of the U.S.-Mexico War in the 19th century, and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, half of what was Mexico was severed and became much of the western part of the United States.

As the centuries unfold, millions of artists will live on the moon and paint the moon and Mars as we go out into the universe.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.