Eero Saarinen Quotes

#1. To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.

Eero Saarinen

#2. The vision always precedes reality.

Leon Tom

#3. Literature is news which stays news.

Ezra Pound

#4. I have come to the conviction that once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part of its interior so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings with the same message.

Eero Saarinen

#5. What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don't understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.

Eero Saarinen

#6. I believe that our society is merely a reflection of what is going on inside each and every one of us.

Seal

#7. The major concern ... was to create a monument which would have lasting significance and would be a landmark of our time ... Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose. But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.

Eero Saarinen

#8. Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

Duke Ellington

#9. I suppose I had some meaning when I wrote it; I believe I understood it then.

George Gordon Byron

#10. The purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man's life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence,

Eero Saarinen

#11. I wanted to clear up the slum of legs ... I wanted to make the chair all one thing again.

Eero Saarinen

#12. Confusion comes from trying to amalgamate several conflicting ideas.

Eero Saarinen

#13. Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be - her voice trembled - penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable. She called us girls.

Margaret Atwood

#14. I think a lot of people like hidden-camera shows where they think they're spying on somebody who doesn't know they're looking at them. And nobody takes it seriously - you either enjoy it and get a laugh out of the reactions or not.

Betty White

#15. Function influence but does not dictate form

Eero Saarinen

#16. Every room that you walk into is better off that you're there.

Jimmy Iovine

#17. Democracy, disciplined and enlightened, is the finest thing in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi