Henry David Thoreau Quotes About Architecture
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Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.
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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
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They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
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Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree.
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Under the one word "house" are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.
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In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least severalgentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory.
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If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,--and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,--it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
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True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
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Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?
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Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.
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One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.
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As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.
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