Philip Johnson Quotes

Anyone who has ever asked for directions knows you need two crucial pieces of information to get good results: a starting point and a destination.

I have an incredible compass. You can put me back in a country I haven't been in 20 years and say, 'Get me from point A to point B,' and I'll take you there.

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there.

I'd like to have a perfect sense of direction. I could get lost with a GPS strapped to my arm.

We're not lost. We're locationally challenged.

I have a really terrible sense of direction.

I have a terrible sense of direction.

I have a horrible sense of direction. I could get lost a mile away from my house.

I get lost a lot.

I've always been terrible at land navigation.

The maps are really like a filter. They filter information for you to make better decisions on where you are going and what to do.

Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn't the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.

We're right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't - and I don't care at all about where I'm not.

Direction determines destination.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

We were just looking at maps.

The sailor cannot see the north / but knows the needle can.

I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

To find where you are going, you must know where you are.

I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

I don't know why it's called "getting lost." Even when you turn down the wrong street, when you find yourself at the dead end of a chain-link fence or a road that turnd to sand, you are somewhere. It just isn't where you expected to be.

Where roads are made I lose my way.In the wide water, in the blue sky there is no line of a track.The pathway is hidden by the birds' wings, by the star-fires, by the flowers of the wayfaring seasons.And I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.

A man went to Istanbul, his first visit there. On his way to a business meeting, this man lost his way. He began raging at himself for getting lost, until a realization allowed him to transcend his ire. "How can I be lost? I've never been here before?" pp 104-105