In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Things in themselves have no life in them. A car can’t comfort or encourage you. A house means nothing if there’s no life and love inside.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

I call architecture frozen music.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it’s to have any meaning in this world – and stop being its apologist.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

Life is our dictionary.

The artist in me cries out for design.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

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

Help others and give something back. I guarantee you will discover that while public service improves the lives and the world around you, its greatest reward is the enrichment and new meaning it will bring your own life.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.