Louis Kahn Quotes

I don't think you really can send an exact message, because any two viewers are so disparate, in terms of their backgrounds, their point of view, their histories, that there's no telling what that message might be.

The same words come from each mouth differently.

You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

The audience, the place you're in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.

Your environment affects you wherever you are.

For an object under the eye will appear very different from the same object placed above it; in an inclosed space, very different from the same in an open space.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what's the tone of the scene.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

A weapon is either offensive or defensive according to which end of it you are looking at.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

Necessity is not a fact; it's an interpretation.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

A man without scenery is completely disarmed.

Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.