Jean Arp Quotes

When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

In harmony with the Tao, the sky is clear and spacious, the earth is solid and full, all creature flourish together, content with the way they are, endlessly repeating themselves, endlessly renewed. When man interferes with the Tao, the sky becomes filthy, the earth becomes depleted, the equilibrium crumbles, creatures become extinct. The Master views the parts with compassion, because he understands the whole. His constant practice is humility. He doesn't glitter like a jewel but lets himself be shaped by the Tao, as rugged and common as stone.

One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

As it acts in the world, the Tao is like the bending of a bow. The top is bent downward; the bottom is bent up. It adjusts excess and deficiency so that there is perfect balance.

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to hers.

The way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They are without any doubleness, and so they produce things in a manner that is unfathomable.

Only the intelligent knows how to identify all things as one. . . . When one is at ease with himself, one is near Tao. This is to let Nature take its own course.

Temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigor.

Nature loves simplicity and unity.

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Nature moves towards balance.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

It must be a balance in everything we do, not too much of everything, keep it simple, not complicated.

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.

Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

Nothing leads to good that is not natural.

Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

Everything man is doing in architecture is to try to go against nature. Of course we have to understand nature to know how far we have to go against nature. The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much. All architects have the tendency to do too much.

Nature is based on harmony. So it says if we want to survive and become more like nature, then we actually have to understand that it's cooperation versus competition.

There exists everywhere a medium in things, determined by equilibrium.