Stephen Gardiner Quotes

It was only from an inner calm that man was able to discover and shape calm surroundings.

The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom.

It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process.

Land is the secure ground of home, the sea is like life, the outside, the unknown.

The interior of the house personifies the private world; the exterior of it is part of the outside world.

The further forward we go, the further back we have to explore in order to go forward again.

The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.

What people want, above all, is order.

Georgian architecture respected the scale of both the individual and the community.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.

The Romans used every housing form known today and they have a remarkably modern look.

Stonehenge was built possibly by the Minoans. It presents one of man's first attempts to order his view of the outside world.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden

The mandala describes balance. This is so whatever the pictorial form.

The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.

In the East there is a gap between the top of the wall and the underside of the roof; the wall does not act as a support. Instead, it acts as a screen, and the Chinese were able to use it as they wished.

The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature.

The Egyptian tomb was the outcome of the Mesopotamian influence and followed from the religious crisis the country had undergone.

The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

Houses mean a creation, something new, a shelter freed from the idea of a cave.

The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.

Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.

And so, inevitably, one returns to the centre of Western culture, Greece, and we have never, in any sense, lost our ties with the architectural concepts that this country's ancient civilization explored and demonstrated, nor with the political and social freedom that lay behind them.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.