Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.
It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.
It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.
Anyone who has dead straight hair wants curls.
You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.
Fashion was my teacher.It taught me how to live. When I see clothes I want to become worthy of them.
perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.
Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.
