“The best friend on earth of man is the tree: When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources of the earth.”

I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Good taste is not a substitute for knowledge.

Wood is universally beautiful to man. It is the most humanly intimate of all materials.

The truth is more important than the facts.

A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration.

There is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.

An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.

An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.

The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get… what you regard as ‘too far’-and when others follow, as they will, move on.

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

Youth is not an age thing. It’s a quality. Once you’ve had it, you never lose it.

Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Each material has its own message.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.

I played against the Brazilians in ’82, who were definitely the best team never to have won the World Cup.

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.

You can’t always have the best team. It’s always a compromise.

The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.