Robert Bringhurst > Quotes

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning

“If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form Of Language: An Essay On Writing And Meaning

“Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

“When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

“Essay on Adam"

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these

is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.”
― Robert Bringhurst

“A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .”
― Robert Bringhurst

“If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

“What shall I do with the night and the day, with this life and this death?”
― Robert Bringhurst

“The designer always has to leave room for the gods.”
― Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking

“I hold the very simpleminded view that everything is related to everything else-and that every one is related to everyone else, and that every species is related to every other. The only way out of this tissue of interrelations, it seems to me, is to stop paying attention, and to substitute something else-hallucination, greed, pride, or hatred, for example-for sensuous connection to the facts. I think it is not the world's task to entertain us, but ours to take an interest in the world.”
― Robert Bringhurst

“Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“A myth is a hypothesis about the personality of reality itself and not the personalities of individual persons, character types, or nations.”
― Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking

“Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

“I hold the very simpleminded view that everything is related to everything else-and that every one is related to everyone else, and that every species is related to every other. The only way out of this tissue of interrelations, it seems to me, is to stop paying attention, and to substitute something else-hallucination, greed, pride, or hatred, for example-for sensuous connection to the facts. I think it is not the world's task to entertain us, but ours to take an interest in the world.”
― Robert Bringhurst

“Typography like other arts, from cooking to choreography, involves a balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the dependably consistent and the unforeseen. Typographers generally take pleasure in the unpredictable length of the paragraph while accepting the simple and reassuring consistency of the paragraph indent. The prose paragraph and its verse counterpart, the stanza, are basic units of linguistic thought and literary style. The typographer must articulate them enough to make them clear, yet not so strongly that the form instead of the content steals the show. If the units of thought, or the boundaries between thoughts, look more important than the thoughts themselves, the typographer has failed.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“...myths are not just stories: they are narrative hypotheses, personified theorems that address the very nature of the world... Myths are really about the nature of nature...”
― Robert Bringhurst

“The history of type design is a small and often neglected subdivision of the history of art. It is nevertheless of keen interest to some of us - first, because it traces an unspoken, but close relation between the visual arts and literature; second, because while type design is a recent and arcane human activity, often conducted by convoluted industrial means, it can retain - or recover - the kind of naturalness we associate with singing, dancing or painting. Humans have been engaged in making art for as long as there have been humans, while the making of letterforms goes back just a few thousand years. Yet type design can participate, like other arts, in something more important and more durable than humans, namely the beauty of being itself.”
― Robert Bringhurst

“A mythology is an ecosystem of myths. It is in other words a functioning community of stories, striving to maintain its own coherence though its membership is constantly subject to change.”
― Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking

“if the poet becomes what-is, then what-is (and no one else) becomes the author of the poem.”
― Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking

“Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.”
― Robert Bringhurst

“Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the the typographer in search of special treatment. In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; now it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike. Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words.
…
Logotypes and logograms push typography in the direction of hieroglyphics, which tend to be looked at rather than read. They also push it toward the realm of candy and drugs, which tend to provoke dependent responses, and away from the realm of food, which tends to promote autonomous being. Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised, and dissected before it is consumed.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Accidental associations are rarely a good basis for choosing a typeface. Books of poems by the twentieth-century Jewish American poet Marvin Bell, for example, have sometimes been set in Bell type -which is eighteenth-century, English and Presbyterian - solely because of the name. Such puns are a private amusement for typographers; they also sometimes work. But a typographic page so well designed that it attains a life of its own will be based on real affinities, not on an inside joke.

Letterforms have character, spirit and personality. Typographers learn to discern these features through years of working first-hand with the forms, and through studying and comparing the work of other designers, present and past. On close inspection, typefaces reveal many hints of their designers' times and temperaments, and even their nationalities and religious faiths. Faces chosen on these grounds are likely to give more interesting results than faces chosen through mere convenience of availability or coincidence of name.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Actually, typefaces and racing bikes are very much alike. Both are ideas as well as machines, and neither should be burdened with excess drag or baggage. Pictures of pumping feet will not make the type go faster, any more than smoke trails, pictures of rocket ships or imitation lightning bolts tied to the frame will improve the speed of the bike.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Type designers are, at their best, the Stradivarii of literature: not merely makers of salable products, but artists who design and make the instruments that other artists use.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style