Oscar Niemeyer Quotes

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners.

I’m interested in natural growth patterns, and the beautiful forms that only nature creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I’m trying to understand.

Straight lines don't exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms have at least a slight curve.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

It's kind of like trying to make straight lines from curves, but involving shapes that sort of dictate what the curves are, if you like, and the difference between two separate pieces creates a third transitional piece if you like.

I have never understood why so many gardeners favour straight lines and narrow, regulated borders; perhaps they think wildness could work only in a larger space.

I have this obsession with pea pods. They're just really nice to look at. They can be perfect.

While fractal geometry is often used in high-tech science, its patterns are surprisingly common in traditional African designs.

A figure with curves always offers a lot of interesting angles.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

I really like the structure of my body. It moves well, it looks good, it photographs well, it understands gesture and nuance.

Approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone ...

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

Here at home, we're in a world of right angles and human construct, so whether it's cement or plastic or steel, everything is at an angle. But nature is chaos theory in full play. So having that uniqueness of what nature is gives me a sense of rejuvenation and scale.

I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure.

There is no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other.

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.