Quotes on Design

Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.

In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have - I can reflect light into the dark places of this world - into the black places in the hearts of men - and change somethings in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.

I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

You have two choices: You can make a living, or you can design a life.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself.

I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with "expressing" myself with obscure creative impressions.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business, if there was any competition.

...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

When nations grow old the Arts grow cold And commerce settles on every tree