“If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House; and next, A beautiful Book.”
William Morris
Book DesignInterior Design
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.
“Art made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.”
William Morris
User-Centred DesignCraftsmanship
“The true root and basis of all Art lies in the handicrafts.”
Walter Crane
CraftsmanshipFoundations
“All junctions of curved lines with curved or of curved lines with straight should be tangential to each other.”
Owen Jones
DetailsLines
“Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations founded upon them.”
Owen Jones
StylisationNature
“Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
FunctionBeauty
“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Visual InterestBoldness
“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
Henry David Thoreau
Sustainable DesignPerspective
“Excellence is never granted to man but as the reward of labour.”
Joshua Reynolds
Hard WorkExcellence
“The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it.”
Joshua Reynolds
ThinkingValue
“The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.”
Leonardo da Vinci
Intentional DesignThinking
“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”
Michelangelo
PerfectionArt
“Sight is the noblest sense of man.”
Albrecht Dürer
Visual DesignPerception
“Ornament is a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty.”
Leon Battista Alberti
OrnamentBeauty
“Design, the father of our three arts, architecture, sculpture, and painting.”
Giorgio Vasari
DesignFoundations
“Yellow has a serene, gay, softly exciting character.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Colour PsychologyYellow
“We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Colour PsychologyBlue
“Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.”
Wassily Kandinsky
ColourEmotion
“When bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open are contrary to the purpose of the baker's art, yet they are beautiful in a manner.”
Marcus Aurelius
ImperfectionNatural Beauty
“Say now what ought now to be said, and put off many things to the proper time.”
Horace
HierarchyClarity
“All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have the idea of what ugliness is.”
Lao Tzu
ContrastPerception
“I cannot teach it to my son, and he cannot learn it from me.”
Chuang Tzu
CraftExperience
“The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.”
Heraclitus
SubtletyHarmony
“Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony, and radiance.”
Thomas Aquinas
BeautyPrinciples
“Late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new.”
Augustine of Hippo
Timeless DesignBeauty