Selected design quotes

1. I'm suspicious of any mode of transportation that requires a running start.

2. Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

3. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

4. In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

5. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

6. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

7. Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

8. I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

9. If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way.

10. In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

11. The old chess is too limited. Imagine playing cards, black jack for example, and every time the dealer has the same starting hand you have the same starting hand. What's the point?

12. It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.

13. Simplicity is the key to brilliance.

14. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

15. I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

16. The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

17. I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

18. The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

19. The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

20. Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.

21. [I]f we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.

22. The course of Nature is the art of God.

23. The more physics you have the less engineering you need.

24. Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.

25. Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.

26. Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

27. Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

28. No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

29. I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

30. Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

31. To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

32. All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

33. A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

34. Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

35. Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

36. I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.

37. Less is only more where more is no good.

38. Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

39. Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

40. Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

41. Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

42. It is filled with beauty. . . a finely made whole that seems to emanate from a very special grace.

43. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: 'It's clever, but is it Art?'

44. 'I wanted to create a game (EarthBound) with real characters; characters whom players would recognize in the people around them.'

45. Mettre tout en equilibre, c'est bien; mettre tout en harmonie, c'est mieux.

46. A full 'definition of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants.

47. Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): 'With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains.' The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.

48. Ikenobo Sen'o remarked on another occasion (this too is in his Sayings) that 'the mountains and strands should appear in their own forms'. Bringing a new spirit into his school of flower arranging, therefore, he found 'flowers' in broken vessels and withered branches, and in them too the enlightenment that comes from flowers. 'The ancients arranged flowers and pursued enlightenment.' Here we see awakening to the heart of the Japanese spirit, under the influence of Zen. And in it too, perhaps, is the heart of a man living in the devastation of long civil wars.

49. ... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About Lisp programming language)

50. In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES's suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.

51. Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

52. Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.

53. We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately... and this is an important way of seeing it... and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form... and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example... this wrench... has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine.

54. That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind

55. I went to the Rayburn Building the other day on trifling business. It was an appalling experience. I had forgotten how preposterous the thing is with its pretentious megatonnage of rock and steel spreading acre after acre down the slope of Capitol Hill in sullen defiance to eternity and man. It dwarfs the forum of the Caesars. Mussolini would have wept in envy. Inside, one is compelled to dwell upon the insignificance of humanity. Not a single tiny wisp of beauty, nothing that is graceful, or charming, or eccentric, or human presents itself to the senses. Trying to imagine Clay and Webster in this celebration to the death of the spirit, erected to the glory that was Congress, is an exercise in comic despair. What do we have? Banks of stainless-steel elevators. Miracles of plumbing. Corridors of cemetery marble stretching to far horizons under the most artificial light millions of dollars can create, a light that abides no shadow, grants no privacy, tolerates nothing that is interesting in the slightest degree. Occasionally a small figure appeared in the distance, grew larger, then larger, then assumed human proportion, then passed and became smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Two ants had passed in a pyramid.

56. Wrap me up so superficial Tied up nicely with a bow

57. Simplify, simplify.

58. Less is more.

59. Logo for the Apple II (1982)

60. Apple Logo (1982)