“Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.”
Plotinus
PerceptionBeauty
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.
“Nature is beautiful because it looks like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature.”
Immanuel Kant
NatureArt
“Beauty is freedom in appearance.”
Friedrich Schiller
BeautyFreedom
“Exuberance is Beauty.”
William Blake
BoldnessEnergy
“Without Minute Neatness of Execution, the Sublime cannot exist!”
William Blake
DetailsExecution
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
RestraintDecisions
“Something there is more needful than expense, and something previous ev'n to taste - 'tis sense.”
Alexander Pope
Good SenseTaste
“'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense.”
Alexander Pope
FunctionValue
“Order is Heaven's first law.”
Alexander Pope
OrderStructure
“The organic form is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Organic DesignForm
“If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression.”
Edgar Allan Poe
User AttentionUnity
“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.”
Auguste Rodin
SubtractionSimplicity
“Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.”
Paul Cézanne
GeometryAbstraction
“Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.”
William Shakespeare
PerceptionBeauty
“O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem by that sweet ornament which truth doth give!”
William Shakespeare
Honest DesignBeauty
“The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, burn'd on the water.”
William Shakespeare
LuxuryVisual Impact
“To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass.”
The Bible (Exodus 31:4)
CraftsmanshipCreativity
“Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet.”
The Bible (Isaiah 28:17)
PrecisionStandards
“O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all.”
The Bible (Psalm 104:24)
VarietyWisdom
“The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.”
The Bible (Proverbs 3:19)
WisdomFoundations
“And upon the top of the pillars was lily work.”
The Bible (1 Kings 7:22)
OrnamentDetails
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
The Bible (Genesis 1:31)
SatisfactionCreation
“The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line.”
The Bible (Isaiah 44:13)
PlanningPrecision
“Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.”
The Bible (Wisdom of Solomon 11:20)
ProportionOrder
“They set their heart to finish their work, and watch to polish it perfectly.”
The Bible (Sirach 38:27)
CraftsmanshipFinishing