Jaime Lerner Quotes

Most of us have heard the saying, 'Cleanliness is next to godliness.' That's a sentiment I value, but another virtue has inspired me to revise that saying. As far as I'm concerned, what's next to godliness is resourcefulness.

We haven't got the money, so we've got to think.

When you don't have much money, you get creative. There's so much money that gets wasted on big movie sets. But when you don't have much money, you improvise.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.

You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There's nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.

I usually just dress myself. I typically make something or buy something and fix it up. I really like to spend my money on accessories like bags, shoes, belts. I don't really spend on things I can make.

I grew up in a family where our mother made our clothing. We didn't have a lot of money, so we learned how to scrimp, and we learned how to invent and to create. And those are learned skills.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

When you start with next to nothing, all you've got is a lot of thought, a lot of innovation, figuring new ways to do things without using a lot of money.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

In Maine, there is a deeply ingrained sense that you can always get a little more use out of something.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

I clearly understood the concept of wise use before I ever heard the actual words, for my father wouldn't allow us to waste anything.

I don't like to waste anything. Any food left over from the night before is always eaten the next day.

I have learned to do more with less, so you don't see the big books anymore.

We haven't shed our engineering pragmatism, so we accomplish things in the simplest manner possible. It helps with budget, obviously. We're not getting rich off web video, and we're supporting two families with our income, so we need to keep as much of the budget to ourselves.

We are going to put "thrift" back in the dictionary.

Frugality is a great revenue.

If we want to be cost-conscious, we should do it, not just talk about how cost-conscious we are.

I think being on a constraint with money makes you much more creative.

We have to learn to do more with less.

You get really scrappy when you're making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It's not like, 'Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let's do things differently.' If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best.