Siyu Liu

“When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.”
― Khushwant Singh, Delhi

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“But when a plethora of stimuli begins to divert us from receptive consciousness, the city renders us insensible. Then, in our inability to order experience, we merely suffer the city and long for some adequate means to comprehend it as a product of human creation--a product of intelligent, ordering forces. Just as the scientist is frustrated when the order or pattern of phenomena is too fleeting to observe or too complex to recognize with existing tools, so is the city-dweller frustrated when human order cannot be found in the environment. At such moments, when one sees only the results of mechanical and economic processes controlling the form and feeling of the place, one feels estranged and excluded.”
― Fumihiko Maki, Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City

“...Originally everything about a Greek or Christian building meant something, and in reference to a higher order of things. This atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness hung about the building like a magic veil. Beauty entered the system only secondarily, impairing the basic feeling of uncanny sublimity, of sanctification by magic or the gods' nearness. At the most, beauty tempered the dread - but this dread was the prerequisite everywhere. What does the beauty of a building mean to us now? The same as the beautiful face of a mindless woman: something masklike.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits