“Everything which is in any way beautiful is beautiful in itself, and terminates in itself, not having praise as part of itself.”
Marcus Aurelius
BeautyIntegrity
Design Quotes
200 FAMOUS QUOTES · DESIGN
Design Quotes
Read 200 of the best design quotes about simplicity, beauty, function and creativity, from William Morris, Leonardo, Emerson, Confucius and more.
“Often one or two purple patches are sewn on to make a fine show.”
Horace
Over-DesignStyle
“When the accomplishments and solid qualities are equally blended, we then have the man of virtue.”
Confucius
BalanceForm And Substance
“The unwrought material, when divided and distributed, forms vessels.”
Lao Tzu
MaterialsMaking
“The great square has no corners.”
Lao Tzu
ParadoxPerfection
“When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten; when the girdle fits, the waist is forgotten.”
Chuang Tzu
User ExperienceInvisible Design
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”
The Bible (Psalm 19:1)
CreationNature
“Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span?”
The Bible (Isaiah 40:12)
MeasurementCreation
“When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.”
The Bible (Proverbs 8:27)
PlanningCreation
“And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty.”
The Bible (Exodus 28:2)
Fashion DesignBeauty
“All this, said David, the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even all the works of this pattern.”
The Bible (1 Chronicles 28:19)
BlueprintsVision
“The poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”
William Shakespeare
CreativityImagination
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
William Shakespeare
Over-DesignSimplicity
“In every work regard the writer's end.”
Alexander Pope
PurposeIntent
“'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, but the joint force and full result of all.”
Alexander Pope
HarmonyWhole
“The sense of beauty consists in simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each and of all to a whole.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
HarmonyComposition
“It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition.”
Edgar Allan Poe
Intentional DesignProcess
“Nature is usually wrong.”
James McNeill Whistler
ArtBold Opinions
“Industry in Art is a necessity - not a virtue.”
James McNeill Whistler
Hard WorkCraft
“The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom.”
James McNeill Whistler
PerfectionProcess
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”
David Hume
PerceptionBeauty
“What we call beautiful in objects seems to be in a compound ratio of uniformity and variety.”
Francis Hutcheson
BalanceVariety
“I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth.”
Edmund Burke
TextureBeauty
“Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory.”
Joshua Reynolds
CreativityInspiration
“A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.”
Joshua Reynolds
OriginalityCreativity