“The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.”

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.

Space is the breath of art.

Man is a phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust.

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands.

Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass — not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy.

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.

Give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities.

Youth is a circumstance you can’t do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.

We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.

Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm.

Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & isn’t dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful—and a huge relief.

I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you, but in the process, I forgot that I was special too.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sculpture the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

Believe nothing of me except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own.

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

We are God’s gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully.