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"The real work of any process of design lies in this task of making up the language, from which you can later generate the one particular design...The individual buildings which you make, will live, or not, according to the depth and wholeness of the language which you use to make them with...If it has the power to make a single building live, it can be used a thousand limes, to make a thousand buildings live."

"So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use will be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for "the many," their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter how well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, because they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say."

"We imagine, because of the distorted view of architecture we have learnt, that some great architect created these buildings, with a few marks of the pencil, worked out laboriously at the drawing board. The fact is that Chartres, no less than the simple farmhouse, was built by a group of men, acting within a common pattern language, deeply steeped in it of course. It was not made by "design" at the drawing board."

"To reach the quality without a name, a building must be made, at least in part, of those materials which age and crumble. Soft tile and brick, soft plaster, fading coats of paint, canvas which has been bleached a little and torn by the wind...fruit, dropping on the paths, and being crushed by people walking over it...None of this can happen in a world which lasts forever."

"Although it is true that a unique event can sometimes change our lives completely, it is not too much to say that the overall character of our lives is given by those events which keep on recurring over and over again. And, by the same token, it is roughly true that any system, any aspect of the life of a part of the world, is essentially governed by those situations which keep on repeating there."

"The life of a house, or of a town, is not given to it, directly, by the shape of its buildings, or by the ornament and plan—it is given to them by the quality of the events and situations we encounter there."

"Those of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the patterns of events which we experience there."

"We can identify the towns and buildings which have this quality simply by asking whether they are like us when we are free. We need only ask ourselves which places have made us feel that breath of sudden passion in them, which whispers to us, and lets us recall those moments when we were ourselves. And the connection between the two is not just an analogy, or similarity. The fact is that each one creates the other."

"But the very beauty of the word "alive" is just its weakness. The overwhelming thing that stays with you is that the fire lives. And yet this is a metaphor...If we are pressed to explain why we call one fire alive and another dead, then we are at a loss. The metaphor makes us believe that we have found a word to grasp the quality without a name."

"We have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a "system" and with "methods" since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos."

"Imagine the most beautiful place you have seen or dreamt of. You have the power to create it, at this very moment, just as you are. And this power we have is so firmly rooted in every one of us that once it is liberated, it will allow us, by our individual, unconnected acts, to make a town, without the slightest need for plans, because, like every living process, it is a process which builds order out of nothing."

"Even the life and beauty of the most are inspiring great religious buildings came from the languages their builders used. But in our time the languages have broken down. Since they are no longer shared, the processes which
keep them deep have broken down; and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live."

"She is like unto life, possessed by all men; and like death, she conquers all men; and like eternity, she enfolds all men."

"There is no such person as a governor. Only the governed exist to govern themselves."

“From the moment my soul was astounded by Mozart’s music...it has often been a favorite occupation for me to deliberate on the Greek view that calls the world a cosmos because it manifests itself as a well-organized whole, as an elegant, transparent adornment for the spirit that acts upon and operates throughout it, the way that happy view lets itself be repeated in a higher order of things, in the world of ideals."

"Everything is quiet out on the street...Far away in a distant street, I hear a man crying “Shrimp for sale.” The air is so warm, and yet the whole city is as if deserted, —Then I call to mind my youth and my first love— when I was filled with longing; now I long only for my first longing. What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream."

"If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not."

"It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That is very true, but it becomes fonder in a purely poetic way. To live in recollection is the most perfect life imaginable; recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has a security that no actuality possesses. A recollected life relationship has already passed into eternity and has no temporal interest anymore."

"No one comes back from the dead; no one has come into the world without weeping. No one asks when one wants to come in; no one asks when one wants to go out."

"The most ludicrous of all ludicrous things, it seems to me, is to be busy in the world, to be a man who is brisk at his meals and brisk at his work."

"And people crowd around the poet and say to him, ‘‘Sing again soon’”’—in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming."

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music."

“He was born in a time when we had no mind for anything except for food. Not like you, spending all your time thinking. We were all so hungry back then…his body will remember, even if the mind forgets.”

“For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return.”

“At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.”

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to yours. Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”