“In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See? — See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it.”

“He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer’s benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office.”

“Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

“… we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”

“Suppose you were a giant who could not see individual people and never became aware of an aggregate of less than one million of them. You would just be able to notice that London contains more matter by day than by night. But you could not possibly be aware of the fact, that on a given day, Mr. Dixon was ill in bed and did not take his usual train. You would therefore believe the movement of matter into London in the morning and out of it in the evening to be a much more regular affair than it is. You would no doubt attribute it to some peculiar force in the Sun. A hypothesis which would be confirmed by the observation of the movement is retarded in foggy weather. If, later, you became able to observe individual people, you would find that there is less regularity than you had supposed. One day, Mr. Dixon is ill and another, Mr. Simpson. The statistical average is not affected, and to a large scale observation there is no difference. You would find that all the regularity you had previously observed could be accounted for by the statistical law of large numbers. Without supposing that Mr. Dixon and Mr. Simpson had any reason beyond caprice for their occasional failure to go to London in the morning. This is exactly the situation which physics has arrived in regard to atoms. It does not know of any laws completely determining their behaviour. And the statistical laws which it has discovered are sufficient to account for the observed regularity in the motions of large bodies. And as the case for determinism has rested on these, it seems to have broken down.”

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”