Oscar Niemeyer Quotes

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

A beautiful dress can be as exciting as a poem.

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.

I think architecture has to be a gift.

I like to aestheticize every possible thing that can be aestheticized.

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Architecture is invention.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

I search for surprise in my architecture. A work of art should cause the emotion of newness.

I call architecture frozen music.

Art is significant deformity.

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn't architecture unless it's alive. Alive is what art is. If it's not alive, it's dead, and it's not art.

Architects think that beauty is a crime.

The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.

Personally, one of the greatest sources of inspiration for my work has been architecture. I've had the chance to see so many exquisite structures, whether they are historical monuments or modern commercial premises.

I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.

Beautiful is difficult. I admire very much the courage of the people who have said, 'Let's do something different. Let's try to see if our environment will be more beautiful and our city will be more beautiful.'

Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.