Christopher Alexander Quotes

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

Family, nature and health all go together.

Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.

And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important.

A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

I don't think I have segments in my life; it runs all together.

I try not to think of my life in terms of separation.

My life is a mosaic, and there's no room in between pieces at all.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes.

When we live our lives with the authenticity demanded by the practice of teaching that is also learning and learning that is also teaching, we are participating in a total experience.... In this experience the beautiful, the decent, and the serious form a circle with hands joined.

Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs,--not only dust and stones, but errors and lies.

When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.

Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.

[K]now that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.

Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.

Integration is a basic law of life; when we resist it, disintegration is the natural result, both inside and outside of us. Thus we come to the concept of harmony through integration.

Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.

The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.

With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces." Nick says. "Maybe," Nick says, "what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking.

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

In our natural body every part has a necessary sympathy with every other; and all together form, by their harmonious conspiration, a healthy whole.