Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

Unless we understand a certain material - metal or resin and plastic - understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example - we can never develop and define form that's appropriate.

The material dictates the approach.

There has to be policies about that, about what materials we use and so on.

We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something.

Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

We want to get full value out of labour so that we may be able to pay it full value. It is use - not conservation - that interests us.

Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that's put to use more gold begets.

A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.

I'm not mannerist. I don't think I'm interested in mannerism. If I ever use it in a way, or if manner is like some kind of product of certain sorts of usage of different kinds of materials, then it's about involution or turning in on that.

When you're working with friends, unless the material is right, our friendship could end.

I don't use iMovie and don't use shitty little cameras to try to prove something or say something because that's a part of the process. We do it just because that's what we like to use.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.

Coal is not dear for the coal-miner who can use it there and then, nor is khadi dear for the villager who manufactures his own khadi.

I don't, consciously anyways, sort of listen to things with the idea of getting something from them that I can use.

There is no need to create. Genius comes only to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.

Above all, innovation is not invention. It is a term of economics rather than of technology.

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

The gross size of our talent inventories is less important than the net use of our talents?

God gives you the resources for success. But it is up to you to recognize them and use them to their fullest.

Here we are surrounded by material that's being manufactured in unimaginable quantities worldwide and is used everywhere. I don't like it, no one likes it, and yet it's pervasive. We don't even see it.

This process, this method necessary to man's survival and prosperity upon the earth, has often been derided as unduly or exclusively "materialistic." But it should be clear that what has happened in this activity proper to man's nature is a fusion of "spirit" and matter; man's mind, using the ideas it has learned, directs his energy in transforming and reshaping matter into ways to sustain and advance his wants and his life. Behind every "produced" good, behind every man-made transformation of natural resources, is an idea directing the effort, a manifestation of man's spirit.

My objective is to design a space that nobody else can come up with while using the material that anyone can use.