“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you are in need of an inspiring distraction there is an excellent list of one-liners on the the Usable Buildigs Trust website some of these favourite quotes were stolen from it.

Education

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible” – Richard Feynman.

“if you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de St Exupéry

Quotations About Design

“[Design is] an expression of purpose. It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art.” – Charles Eames

“The difficulty does not lie in making things but in creating the conditions under which one can do without those things” – Constantin Brancusi

“I don’t remember being forced to accept compromises, but I’ve willingly accepted constraint.” – Charles Eames

“I was working as a physicist. I read that the construction industry had experimented with adding insulation to new buildings and that energy consumption had failed to reduce. This offended me – it was counter to the basic laws of physics. I knew that they must be doing something wrong. So I made it my mission to find out what, and to establish what was needed to do it right.” — Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Feist

Quotations About Simplicity

“Seek simplicity and distrust it. “– A N Whitehead

“Every no takes you one step closer to a yes”. — Winston Churchill to sport artist Paul Trevillion

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there” – Miles Davis

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” – Charles Mingus

 “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”– Leonardo Da Vinci

“The creative process is in formulating the problem. Once that is done in the right way, it’s all routine table work. The problem is solved” – Piet Hein

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair”— Douglas Adams

Quotations About Reason

“He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.” – William Drummond

“When one admits that nothing is certain, I think one should add that some things are much more clearly certain than others” – Bertrand Russell

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” – Antisthenes

Quotations About Civilisation

“If the choice is between cooking alive and wasting money unnecessarily I would rather waste some money, because long before we cook we are going to kill each other if we don’t deal with climate change.” – George Soros

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” — Douglas Adams, “Last Chance to See”

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”– Alfred North Whitehead

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
– Gandhi

“A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.” — Robert M. Hamilton