Quotes by Designers

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
William Morris
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
Cecil Beaton
O thrush your song is passing sweet But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.
William Morris
After twenty annual visits I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.
Cecil Beaton
There comes a point when you realize that these things, these brands, aren't "enough." Having more or better or best doesn't provide you with a lasting sense of having more or being better or being best. It's a rather fleeting experience, this romantic attachment to brands, and I find that if I'm not careful, the search for having more or better or best is a precarious journey into the infinite. When you depend on finite objects-or brands-to provide you with a long-term sense of self or love or pride or achievement, you start yourself out on a path with no end. No object, no product, and no brand can provide you with ultimate, infinite satisfaction.
Debbie Millman
Basic geometric shapes communicate universal qualities common to all cultures. Practical design integrates them appropriately.
Maggie Macnab
In geometry, as in nature, the circle is the archetypal shape of wholeness and inclusion. It is an effective shape for nonprofits or community-focused efforts.
Maggie Macnab
Branding is simply pattern recognition, established across multiple tiers of application and fueled by the energy of money.
Maggie Macnab
Optimal design delivers information in ways that are useful, beautiful and improve the experience of all involved: audience, client and designer.
Maggie Macnab
A company has integrity when its words and actions consistently match the branding effort.
Maggie Macnab
We are … the un-proud non-possessors of objects whose chief substance is that of the transient symbol. Our Puritan fear of the love of things turns out to have been groundless after all, for we do not love things or even possess them: they pass through our lives as barium passes through the digestive tract, unassimilated, their function merely to flash signals along the way.
Ralph Caplan
It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
Jony Ive
Just because it's old, doesn't mean it's gold.
Bruce Littlefield
There's nothing worse than the one that got away. It haunts you for weeks like a bad dream, eats away at your psyche like a termite on softened wood.
Bruce Littlefield
An Airstream is a lot like a first love: you are lured by her charm, seduced by her beauty, and once bitten, you are forever chasing after her mystique.
Bruce Littlefield
Omit the non-essential.
Per Mollerup
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
John Maeda
Buckminster Fuller explained to me once that because our world is constructed from geometric relations like the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Series, by thinking about geometry all the time, you could organize and harmonize your life with the structure of the world.
Einar Thorsteinn
A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.
Ralph Caplan
As well as a shared mentality, the Establishment is cemented by financial links and a 'revolving door' culture: that is, powerful individuals gliding between the political, corporate and media worlds - or who manage to inhabit these various worlds at the same time. The terms of political debate are in large part dictated by a media controlled by a small number of exceptionally rich owners, while think tanks and political parties are funded by wealthy individuals and corporate interests.
Owen Jones
A world without problems is an illusion, so is a world without solutions.
Gianni Sarcone
All our media are given over to things that are better left unsaid.
Ralph Caplan
A child conceived on Christmas Eve is considered unlucky and will later resent his parents for their unholy transgression, their lack of control and piety. The child may be deformed with a harelip or be cursed with the ears and head of a wolf. Or the infant may be born a werewolf.
Jody Shields
Ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure...it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an "acceptable" rate.
William McDonough
You can never meet your potential until you truly learn to love yourself.
Teresa Collins
I missed the moonlight, the stars. There were times I forgot that there was an entire universe above the clouds. It was as if a shroud had been pulled around the Earth. Over time, we would forget everything that we had once struggled so hard to observe and learn and prove. We would forget about Jupiter and its churning storms. We would forget about the Big Dipper, about Halley's comet. We would stumble across telescopes in old department stores and never give them a second look, never wonder about the things they once made large.
Jason Gurley
Take your pleasure seriously.
Charles Eames
The one luxury that I'll never give up is men.
Carolyn Roehme
OctoberO love, turn from the changing sea and gaze,Down these grey slopes, upon the year grown old,A-dying 'mid the autumn-scented hazeThat hangeth o'er the hollow in the wold,Where the wind-bitten ancient elms infoldGrey church, long barn, orchard, and red-roofed stead,Wrought in dead days for men a long while dead.Come down, O love; may not our hands still meet,Since still we live today, forgetting June,Forgetting May, deeming October sweet? - - Oh, hearken! hearken! through the afternoonThe grey tower sings a strange old tinkling tune!Sweet, sweet, and sad, the toiling year's last breath,To satiate of life, to strive with death.And we too -will it not be soft and kind,That rest from life, from patience, and from pain,That rest from bliss we know not when we find,That rest from love which ne'er the end can gain?- Hark! how the tune swells, that erewhile did wane!Look up, love! -Ah! cling close, and never move!How can I have enough of life and love?
William Morris
The best... measure of innovation is change in human behavior.
Stuart Butterfield
You must be Independent, Independent, Independent - don't talk so much but do more - go your own way and let your neighbour go his... Shake off all the props - the props tradition and authority give you - and go alone - crawl - stumble - stagger - but go alone.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
We are liberated by the examples of the brave, the talented, and the successful if we allow ourselves that freedom.
Teresa Collins
We live in a society of {more, faster, and extra.} So we feel the need to respond {more, faster, and extra.} Such a useless exercise. So much joy can be found in slowing down.
Emily Ley
If Enlightenment was the salad, Entanglement is the soup
Neri Oxman
Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper
Tony Alleyne
How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?
William Morris
In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege.
Michael Graves
Whether it's trying to convince others that something is more true, more virtuous, or more desirable--all communication is rhetoric in action.
Leonard Koren
Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer--or interpret, or imagine--much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen.
Jessica Helfand
I am not here to serve myself. I am not here to be lauded, petted, admired or ‘affirmed.’ I am here to build men, cultures and kingdoms. When I find myself in the midst of difficulties and pain, will I persevere, or will I become a coward and pity myself? We do not have time for self-pity! We have much to do, and the hour is late! We need a broader vision of home than just ourselves as wives and mothers, sisters and daughters. We need to understand that we are to work to build Christ’s kingdom—for eternity!
Jennie Chancey
Making a beautiful, happy home is not about what we don't have or what we want to buy. It's all about what we do have, and how incredibly precious it all is. It's about how we spend the days we're given with this family of ours, and making the home we share a place our kids will love to describe to our grandchildren. It's about making our kids' memories delightful.
Gabrielle Stanley Blair
Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.
Kevin McCloud
Let tomorrow cross its own rivers.
William Morris
Be grateful for every moment and every breath.
Teresa Collins
Life is truly too short to not be HAPPY and GRATEFUL today.
Teresa Collins
Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.
William McDonough
As a non-believer, I want the atheist case to be made. I want religious belief to be scrutinised and challenged. I want Britain to be a genuinely secular nation, where religious belief is protected and defended as a private matter of conscience. But I feel prevented from doing so because atheism in public life has become so dominated by a particular breed that ends up dressing up bigotry as non-belief. It is a tragedy. And that is why it is so important that atheists distance themselves from those who undermine our position. Richard Dawkins can rant and rave about Muslims as much as he wants. But atheists: let's stop allowing him to do it in our name.
Owen Jones
So many roads. So many detours. So many choices. So many mistakes.
Sarah Jessica Parker
The objective is to change the system and the behaviour it encourages, rather than replacing 'bad' people with 'good' people.
Owen Jones
I would like Britain - and indeed other countries - to be run in the interests of people's needs and aspirations, rather than on the basis of profit for a small elite; for democracy to be democratically managed by working people; for democracy to be extended as far as possible, including in the workplace and the economy.
Owen Jones
Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate.
Sarah Jessica Parker
Sometimes we need fellow radicals to remind us of what we, as writers, have set out to proclaim.
Michael Graves
The fig tree grows its flowers strangely inside out, concealed within the soft interior of the fruit. Erszébet imagines the fig's hidden fairy weight of seeds, grown in sweetness that is also a darkness. Like treasure in a cave.
Jody Shields
You can't fulfill your calling inside your comfort zone.
Johnathan Key
To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.
Veronique Vienne
It does wonders for my own psyche to turn envy into inspiration. No matter how successful we become, we're never above that.
Hillman Curtis
Setbacks are just stepping stones to great things.
Teresa Collins
Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.
Judith Schalansky
She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves' nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the flattened yellow grasses, hoping to inhale the odor of a werewolf, a csordásfarkas. As if his scent was a charm. She smelled nothing but hay burned by the afternoon sun.
Jody Shields
Eventually Everything Connects - all the Pain, the Struggle & the People.
Charles Eames