Le Corbusier Quotes

The "styles" are a lie. ~ Le Corbusier

Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois. ~ Le Corbusier

Negro music has touched America because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine. It is in two part time; tears in the heart; movement of the legs, torso arms and head. The music of the era of construction; innovating. It floods the body and heart; it floods the USA and its floods the world. The jazz is more advanced than the architecture. If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle. ~ Le Corbusier

With the idea that a single creator can build a society wherein a huge number of people will live, Le Corbusier later approached Stalin. In India, he charmed a powerful provincial family and ended up making huge, sculptural relics in Chandigarh. ~ Masato Otaka

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system. ~ Le Corbusier

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for. ~ Michael Graves

You don't start a revolution by fighting the state but by presenting the solutions. ~ Le Corbusier

We are all affected by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini, and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve. ~ Richard Meier

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep. ~ Le Corbusier

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city. ~ Le Corbusier

Life never stops. The torment of men will be eternal, unless the function of creating and acting and changing, living intensely through each day, be considered an eternal joy. ~ Le Corbusier

By law, all buildings should be white. ~ Le Corbusier

Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan - that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds. ~ Le Corbusier

You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong. ~ Le Corbusier

The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach. ~ Le Corbusier

The house is a machine for living in. ~ Le Corbusier

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe. ~ Le Corbusier

Light creates ambience and feel of a place, as well as the expression of a structure. ~ Le Corbusier

Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it. ~ Le Corbusier

Architects everywhere have recognized the need of ... a tool which may be put in the hands of creators of form, with the simple aim ... of making the bad difficult and the good easy. ~ Le Corbusier

When does a building actually become a built? ~ Le Corbusier

The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US. ~ Le Corbusier

You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work.
But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture. Art enters in. ~ Le Corbusier

Vehicular traffic is completely forbidden in the green strips, where tranquility shall reign and the curse of noise shall not penetrate. ~ Le Corbusier

The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house. ~ Le Corbusier

My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life
the poetry. ~ Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way. ~ Alain De Botton

Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: light and shade reveal these forms. ~ Le Corbusier

The materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy. ~ Le Corbusier

The home should be the treasure chest of living. ~ Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird. ~ Tom Wolfe

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects. ~ Le Corbusier

We strike a medium, and he shivers in his bag, while I swelter in mine, but considering from what distances we have come together, we do well enough. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The meal began with pickled squid, oyster shooters, marinated anchovies, and scungilli salad. Then Rosalie set an enormous bowl of pasta con le vongole in front of Sal, who ladled it out, talking the entire time. The pasta was followed by huge platters of scampi, which we passed around. It was almost eleven when Rosalie set three enormous stuffed turbots on the table, and it was near midnight when she appeared with a plate of warm sugar-dusted sfinge.
"So our first taste of the New Year will be sweet," Sal whispered in my ear. ~ Ruth Reichl

I always have at least four different lip products in my purse - I'm obsessed! I'm into L'Oreal Infallible Le Rouge 'Unending Kiss.' It's a very soft and natural pink color. I've also discovered Burt's Bees tinted lip balm in 'sweet violet.' I like it because it's very natural and feels good on my lips. ~ Edy Ganem

Era un pintor tan viejo que se le habían quedado calvos los pinceles.
(He was such an old painter that his brushes had gone bald.) ~ Ramon Gomez De La Serna

You don't really want to be always thinking about the future, always thinking about where you're heading for. You've got to think about how you're getting there. ~ Simon Le Bon

I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Unrequited love is like buying a dress that you can't fit into but you promise yourself you'll diet for - you can't think about the dress, only about the fact that your body is too big for it. ~ Kate Le Vann

You're a crime fiction writer if...The injustices of this world boil your blood. You become a fucking supernova. So you write. ~ Verge Le Noir

When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast ... The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. ~ J M G Le Clezio

What good is music? None, Gage thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses that men build for themselves, that they may see the sky. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can seperate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differance of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Macaulay, teaches us in a passage that the politicians of all Latin countries ought to learn by heart. After having shown all the good that can be accomplished by laws which appear from the point of view of pure reason a chaos of absurdities and contradictions, he compares the scores of constitutions that have been engulphed in the convulsions of the Latin peoples with that of England, and points out that the latter has only been very slowly changed part by part, under the influence of immediate necessities and never of speculative reasoning ~ Gustave Le Bon

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?"
"I am myself. My body will not decay and die-"
"A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life."
"I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!"
"Who are you, then?"
"The Immortal One."
"Say your name."
"The King."
"Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!"
"You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist."
"You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him. ~ Evelyn Waugh

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If Romeo and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it. ~ Richard Le Gallienne

In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora herself. Cora knew she was handsome -- wasn't she always referred to in the papers as 'the divine Miss Cash'? She was clever -- she could speak three languages and could handle calculus. And as to rich, well, she was undoubtedly that. Emma Woodhouse was not rich in the way that she, Cora Cash, was rich. Emma Woodhouse did not lie on a lit à la polonaise once owned by Madame du Barry in a room which was, but for the lingering smell of paint, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber at le petit Trianon. Emma Woodhouse went to dances at the Assembly Rooms, not fancy dress spectaculars in specially built ballrooms. But Emma Woodhouse was motherless which meant, thought Cora, that she was handsome, clever, rich and free. ~ Daisy Goodwin

Owning is owing, having is hoarding. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The machine conceals the machinations. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We just don't know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn't any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us. ~ John Le Carre

They were waiting for Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, known in society as le terrible dragon, a lady celebrated not for her wealth or distinction, but for her straightforward speech and the frank simplicity of her manners. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite - sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day
the light of day, faint in her windowless room. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn't important, what is? If it isn't done honorably, where is honor? Ista ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Marine Le Pen may want me dead, that's possible, but she must not count on my co-operation ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

God gave to Adam and to his descendants the gift of intelligence, asking in return, not for blind praise, but for a lucid and joyful understanding of the nature of all things and their source. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries? ~ John Le Carre

She had a pocket recorder and was taking all this down: every five seconds, as the law required, the thing went teep. Will you describe the therapy you're employing please, teep and explain the role this device plays in it? Don't tell me how it teep works, that's in your report, but what it does. Teep for instance, how does its use differ from the Elektroson or the trancap? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Le sang nouveau est arrivé," said Vlad.


"Carpe diem," said the Count.


"By the throat," said the Countess. ~ Terry Pratchett

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

She wants to be friends. But what does that mean? Were we ever really friends? Friends don't stay up talking on the phone Every Single Night about Stupid Lit le Things and Most Important Things until it's light outside. Friends don't tell each other their most secret secrets. Friends don't hook up. Friends don't ache for each other. They just don't. ~ Ted Michael

The story is the way the story is told. Adam's ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the tracks that I have is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - by the way, that's Bach's second son - Emanuel Bach's variations on "Le Folie." You'll definitely hear - I mean, I think if we listen to, say, the last couple of minutes of that track, there's a wide range of colors that the harpsichord is capable of. And I think, you know, that gives lie to the assumption that it doesn't have that kind of variety. And I think it very much speaks for itself. ~ Mahan Esfahani

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin