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Architecture Quotes

56 quotes about architecture. Every quote shows where it comes from and how far to trust it.

Random quote on Architecture

Most quoted on architecture:

The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect.

William Burges

Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.

John Prebble

The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music, which one hears for one's good as one approaches it.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Corinne (1807)

Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.

Thomas Gray

'Fore God, you have here a goodly dwelling and a rich.

William Shakespeare

He that has a house to put's head in has a good head-piece.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)

A man who could build a church, as one may say, by squinting at a sheet of paper.

Charles Dickens

The true architectural art, that art toward which I would lead you, rests, not upon scholarship but upon human powers; and, therefore, it is to be tested, not by the fruits of scholarship, but by the touch-stone of humanity.

Louis Sullivan Kindergarten Chats (1918)

Architecture and psychology suddenly become very close.

Jacques Herzog

No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung,
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence.

Reginald Heber

Anon, out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose, like an exhalation.

John Milton

ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Dictionary (1906)

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Poems (1847)

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the gods see everywhere.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Seaside and the Fireside (1850)

No complete architecture has yet appeared in the history of the world because men, in this form of art alone, have obstinately sought to express themselves solely in terms either of the head or of the heart.

Louis Sullivan Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.

Francis Bacon

Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.

John Ruskin

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Victor Hugo

Silently as a dream the fabric rose;
No sound of hammer or of saw was there.

William Cowper The Task (1785)

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter, can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

John Ruskin

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