Design Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To diminish envy, let us consider not what others possess, but what they enjoy; mere riches may be the gift of lucky accident or blind chance, but happiness must be the result of prudent preference and rational design; the highest happiness then can have no other foundation than the deepest wisdom; and the happiest fool is only as happy as he knows how to be.

Charles Caleb Colton

Any subject is suitable provided it is of sufficient interest, but the design must be very carefully considered, and plenty of time and thought given to its construction.

Walter J. Phillips

Happily the Universe in which we dwell is not the result of chance, and where chance seems to work it is our own deficient faculties which prevent us from recognizing the operating of Law and of Design.

William Stanley Jevons

The low desire, the base design
That makes another's virtues less.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A...student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education...

We were designed to know, serve, and love God supremely - and when we are faithful to that design, we flourish.

Tim Keller (pastor)

Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference.

If there is one important result that comes out of our inquiry into the nature of the Universe it is this: when by patient inquiry we learn the answer to any problem, we always find, both as a whole and in detail, that the answer thus revealed is finer in concept and design than anything we could ever have arrived at by a random guess.

Organisms die but their genes pass on — often mutated and redistributed, it is true, but genes nevertheless; and it is difficult, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the design of the organism is merely to provide for gene multiplication and survival.

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

William McDonough

To dazzle let the vain design, To raise the thought and touch the heart, be thine!

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.

William Shenstone

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.

John F. Carlson

Gays have always been in the military. Alexander the Great was originally Alexander the Fabulous. A gay man invented C-rations. He claims he could never talk anyone into the cilantro garnish. Obviously, gays were not allowed to design the outfits, because we never would have stayed with the earth tones for so long.

For Solomon, he lived at ease, and full Of honour, wealth, high fare, aimed not beyond Higher design than to enjoy his state.

Here learn, ye mountains more unjust, Which to abrupter greatness thrust, Which do, with your hook-shoulder'd height, The earth deform, and heaven fright, For whose excrescence, ill design'd, Nature must a new centre find, Learn here those humble steps to tread, Which to securer glory lead.

A blacksmith, Thomas Newcomen, in collaboration with a plumber, John Calley, produced the first commercially successful machine for "raising water by fire." Newcomen could not have based his design on prevailing scientific theory, White argued, because his engine relied on the dissolution of air in steam, and "scientists in his day were not aware that air dissolves in water." Evidently "the mastery of steam power" was a product of empirical science and was "not influenced by Galilean science."

Clifford D. Conner

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.

God always gave us light in our doubts, when we had no other design but to please Him.

Brother Lawrence

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.

Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn't much to see. I suspect that whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.