Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Architecture
Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.
Bacon—Essays. Of Building.
There was King Bradmond’s palace,
Was never none richer, the story says:
For all the windows and the walls
Were painted with gold, both towers and halls;
Pillars and doors all were of brass;
Windows of latten were set with glass;
It was so rich in many wise,
That it was like a paradise.
Sir Bevis of Hamptoun. MS. in Caius College.
Old houses mended,
Cost little less than new, before they’re ended.
Colley Cibber—Prologue to the Double Gallant. L. 15.
Silently as a dream the fabric rose;
No sound of hammer or of saw was there.
Cowper—The Task. Bk. V. L. 144.
A man who could build a church, as one may say, by squinting at a sheet of paper.
Dickens—Martin Chuzzlewit. Vol. II. Ch. VI.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as the ærial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.
Emerson—Essays. Of History.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.
Emerson—The Problem.
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity:
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
Emerson—The Problem.
Middle wall of partition.
Ephesians. II. 14.
An arch never sleeps.
J. Fergusson—History of Indian and Eastern Architecture. P. 210. (Referring to the Hindu aphorism of the sleepless arch.) Also the refrain of a novel by J. Meade Falkner—The Nebuly Cloud.
Die Baukunst ist eine erstarrte Musik.
Architecture is frozen music.
Goethe—Conversation with Eckermann. March 23, 1829.
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.
Gray—A Long Story.
No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung,
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence.
Bishop Heber—Palestine. L. 163. (“No workman’s steel,” as recited by Heber in The Sheldonian, June 15, 1803.)
When I lately stood with a friend before [the cathedral of] Amiens,… he asked me how it happens that we can no longer build such piles? I replied: “Dear Alphonse, men in those days had convictions (Ueberzeugungen), we moderns have opinions (Meinungen) and it requires something more than an opinion to build a Gothic cathedral.
Heine—Confidential Letters to August Lewald on the French Stage. Letter 9. Trans. by C. G. Leland.
So that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.
I Kings. VI. 7.
Grandeur***consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.
Charles Kingsley—Prose Idylls. My Winter Garden.
In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the gods see everywhere.
Longfellow—The Builders. St. 5.
The architect
Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,
And with him toiled his children, and their lives
Were builded, with his own, into the walls,
As offerings unto God.
Longfellow—Christus. The Golden Legend. Pt. III. In the Cathedral.
Ah, to build, to build!
That is the noblest of all the arts.
Longfellow—Michael Angelo. Pt. I. II. L. 54.
Anon, out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose, like an exhalation.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. I. L. 710.
Nor did there want
Cornice or frieze with bossy sculpture graven.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. I. L. 715.
The hasty multitude
Admiring enter’d, and the work some praise,
And some the architect: his hand was known
In heaven by many a tower’d structure high,
Where scepter’d angels held their residence,
And sat as princes.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. I. L. 730.
Thus when we view some well-proportion’d dome,
******
No single parts unequally surprise,
All comes united to th’ admiring eyes.
Pope—Essay on Criticism. Pt. II. L. 47.
The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.
Psalms. CXVIII. 22.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some intellectual intention.
Ruskin—Seven Lamps of Architecture. The Lamp of Memory.
It was stated,***that the value of architecture depended on two distinct characters:—the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation.
Ruskin—Seven Lamps of Architecture. The Lamp of Beauty.
I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be within and without:***with such differences as might suit and express each man’s character and occupation, and partly his history.
Ruskin—Seven Lamps of Architecture. The Lamp of Memory.
Therefore when we build, let us think that we build (public edifices) forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! this our fathers did for us.”
Ruskin—Seven Lamps of Architecture. The Lamp of Memory.
We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.
Ruskin—The Stones of Venice. Vol. I. Ch. II.
Architecture is the work of nations.
Ruskin—True and Beautiful. Sculpture.
No person who is not a great sculptor or painter, can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
Ruskin—True and Beautiful. Sculpture.
Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
Ruskin—True and Beautiful. Sculpture.
Since it [architecture] is music in space, as it were a frozen music…. If architecture in general is frozen music.
Schelling—Philosophie der Kunst. Pp. 576, 593.
When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection.
Henry IV. Pt. II. Act I. Sc. 3. L. 41.
’Fore God, you have here a goodly dwelling and a rich.
Henry IV. Pt. II. Act V. Sc. 3. L. 6.
He that has a house to put’s head in has a good head-piece.
King Lear. Act III. Sc. 2. L. 25.
La vue d’un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez.
The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music which one hears for one’s good as one approaches it.
Madame De Staël—Corinne. Bk. IV. Ch. III.
Behold, ye builders, demigods who made England’s Walhalla [Westminster Abbey].
Theodore Watts-Dunton—The Silent Voices. No. 4. The Minster Spirits.