"It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" - Abraham Lincoln

"Abraham Lincoln once said that 'If you're a racist, I will attack you with the North,' and these are the principles I carry with me in the workplace." - Michael Scott

This is an elliptical quote from Shelley that I've always liked:

"...the mirrors of the gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present...."

Kafka can also be counted on for a good quote:

"Leopards invade the temple and drink wine from the chalices. This happens again and again. Finally, it is foretold and is incorporated into the liturgy."

"Serenity now!" - Frank Costanza

<<L'acte sexuel est dans le temps ce que le tigre est dans l'espace.>>

'The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.'

Georges Bataille, La part maudite.

ars longa, vita brevis

in vino veritas

do song lyrics count? if so, this one's been on play lately for me.

"we're just a million little gods causin' rainstorms, turnin' every good thing to rust"

-"wake up" by arcade fire

spotted on a local blog this morning talking about a lame frat-boy restaurant:

"Kelly's beer gives me the gas of 10 men."

and

"When a man eats a Corn Nut, he says, ‘to hell with everything.’”
-Marc Porter Zasada

"Every man is an island"

"64k ought to be enough for anybody."

-- Bill Gates

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger"

-FLW

" never draw more in the morning than you can erase in the afternoon "

here's a simple one ..but still one of the basic trues in human life.. at least in the civilized world.

"wer ficken will muss freundlich sein" old german saying

means:

"who wants to fuck, needs to be friendly"

another good one:

"i know not with what weapons world war III will be fought, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

-einstein

It shuld acturly ,but then, what about start using it ? What about building some nice houses instead of most of what's build today, to expensive acturly not profiting from digital tools. But true even 8 bit is enough for most then emagine, how different ,how increadible things could surpas , mountains of money new cheap houses, brand new production technology digital ofcaurse. Then emagine what effords multifold the brand new fabrication the innovative aproach even new materials must qualify.

"64k ought to be enough for anybody."

I would obviously agrea but then what ?

Nobody is allowed to quote Dave Matthews Band for this thread.

"we shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we began,
and know the place for the first time."

t.s. elliott

n_,

Dave is great. But that is still a good point for this thread. haha


"I prefer drawing to talking, drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies" -Le Corbusier

"Technology is the answer, but what is the question?"
-Cedric Price

"money talks, but it dont sing" - sherrrie levine

I cant change the world, but I can change the world in me - U2

you mean coitus?

"vagina? i mean, you know the guy?"

herb muschamp wasn't always good, but sometimes he had some winners:

Architecture, we forget at our peril, is inherently violent. It invariably subtracts from the range of available possibilities, especially the perennially attractive option of building nothing at all. In this sense, construction sites are crime scenes. Memories, landscapes, slices of sky, beloved vistas and old neighborhoods are violated even when buildings of distinction take their place. Perhaps the most architecture can do is convert aggression into desire, its primitive twin. Beauty is an effect of this emotional transmutation. – Herbert Muschamp

another good one from a most-of-the-time blowhard:

It is the effort that human beings make to put the marks of skill and love on the artifacts they leave behind that ennobles us in the face of life’s tragic nature, and lifts us close to the domain of angels. To behold a beautiful building, or a beautiful painting, or a beautiful garden made by someone now dissolved into time, and to be moved by these things, is to experience a residue of skill and love expended in the face of certain destruction, and this once again speaks to the tragic nature of the human predicament. – James Howard Kunstler.

– Gio Ponti

- Oscar Wilde

Nostalgia, an irrational yearning for the return to another time, dominates American architecture today. Preservation of the past continues in the mind, in books, in photographs and films, and in the conservation of past construction but simulating the past is a travesty of the present. This return to a romanticized time avoids the existential burden of time-its angst and its joy.

Juhani Pallasmaa

– Milorad Pavic, from "Landscape Painted with Tea".

In line with Steven's Kunstler quote, I actually read this yesterday in an ad for a local imported rug dealer with whom we do a lot of business, and I admit it moved me:

It would have been simpler - and the rugs just as useful - to leave the wool undyed. To weave solid colors, or simple stripes. But since the beginning, handmade carpets have been adorned with clouds and hunting scenes, ladders, medallions, niches for prayer. Why bother? What makes us human?

and to answer 207moak's great one:

Let us be clear about this, the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of our own country’s history were intimately part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of mechanically reproducing these forms or bringing them back to life; it is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicate some earlier form, because of its delight for the eye, without realizing how empty a form is without the life that once supported it. There is no such thing as a modern colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a modern Tudor house.

If one seeks to reproduce such a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it is a fake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patent the fact will be…The great lesson of history – and this applies to all the arts – is that the past cannot be recaptured except in spirit. We cannot live another person’s life; we cannot, except in the spirit of a costume ball…Our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the opportunities of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative spirit. – Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture, 1941.

^^^ that was reprinted in dwell in late '06, and the following appeared in a letters column a month or so later:

Response: …It is a scathing ans still relevant (perhaps now more than ever) comment which cuts to the heart of a common misperception that we can replicate the past in buildings we build today and, in doing so, we are achieving something worthwhile, or even paying homage to the past…By spending time, money, and other resources trying to replicate the past, we are not paying homage, but rather we are betraying the people who worked so hard in those times to provide us with an architecture that spoke of those periods. These men and women, pioneers of their time, would look at us with dismay as we fail to reinvent, redesign, and create our architecture and housing forms based on today’s environmental, social, and cultural needs. – R Sethi, Dwell, Dec/Jan 2007.

"The greater the artist the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is a consolation prize to those less talented."

"The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy."

- Le Corbusier.

to go along with the "what are you into" thread


"The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad"

Salvador Dali in his autobiography
the secret life of....

The job to be done in philosophy -- as often in architecture -- is really more a job on oneself. On one's own viewpoint. On how one sees things. (And what one demands of them)

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture&Value

"A meal that does not end with cheese is like a beautiful women with one eye."

-Brillat Savarin

Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen roaming free

-David Bowie

One of my favorites from grad school (Thanks Lars)

"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."

Pablo Picasso

'shit happens'

'we will see you next fall'

when said by your master's thesis adviser at your final review

'If you want to be universal, be specific'

-Hitchcock-

"Never remember anything you can read in a book"

-Einstein

The sun is gone...but I have a light.

-Kurt Cobain

"I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe"

jorge luis borges - the aleph

"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."

-Einstein


"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women."

-Homer Simpson

Im a fighter for a cause whether or not there is a fight, or for that matter, a cause.

-Anonymous.

"Never trust a man, who, when left alone in a room with a tea-cosy, doesn't try it on."

Billy Conolly

"the choices you make dictate the life that you lead" -unknown

"He left for the day."

-Receptionist of our SE, at 9:30AM this morning