“It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice.”
John Ruskin
CraftsmanshipDevotion
Architecture Quotes
200 FAMOUS QUOTES · ARCHITECTURE
Architecture Quotes
Read the best architecture quotes on design, beauty, buildings and building for the future from Vitruvius, John Ruskin, Louis Sullivan and more.
“Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life.”
John Ruskin
ImperfectionLife
“The demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”
John Ruskin
PerfectionismArt
“It is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture.”
John Ruskin
TimeHeritage
“I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples.”
John Ruskin
HomeDignity
“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.”
John Ruskin
CraftsmanshipHumanity
“All beautiful lines are adaptations of those which are commonest in the external creation.”
John Ruskin
NatureDesign
“What business have we with art at all unless all can share it?”
William Morris
ArtEquality
“Art is man's expression of his joy in labour.”
William Morris
CraftsmanshipJoy
“Architecture is a science arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning.”
Vitruvius
DefinitionLearning
“In all matters, but particularly in architecture, there are these two points: the thing signified, and that which gives it its significance.”
Vitruvius
MeaningDesign
“In the Middle Ages, men had no great thought that they did not write down in stone.”
Victor Hugo
HistoryStone
“The passive Master lent his hand to the vast soul that o'er him planned.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
InspirationCreativity
“A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
ArtWorld
“Build, therefore, your own world.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
VisionBuilding
“The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress.”
Edward Coke
HomeSecurity
“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
Henry David Thoreau
EnvironmentHome
“The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature.”
Henry David Thoreau
NatureSimplicity
“The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely.”
Walt Whitman
CitiesPeople
“Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room.”
William Wordsworth
Small SpacesContentment
“The city is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
CitiesEternity
“The owner should bring honour to the house, not the house to its owner.”
Cicero
HomeCharacter
“I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze.”
Horace
LegacyMonuments
“Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation.”
The Bible (Isaiah 28:16)
CornerstoneFoundation
“I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles.”
The Bible (Isaiah 54:11-12)
BeautyMaterials