John Ruskin Quotes

People forget that art is not just a piece of entertainment. It is the place where we collectively declare our values and then act on them. That's one of the most powerful things we have as a community: our culture and our art. And it's the intersection between life and how people deal with life. It's the most important thing we do.

Working off one genius sketch is not the way great architecture should be made.

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building.

Art has to address eternal issues.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.

We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.

The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."

God created black people and black people created style.

Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts.

The best way to get to know any bunch of people is to go and listen to their music.

The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

in architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it.

I think Miss Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture, and she's a very natural actress, and a very good one.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.

People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.