“What does a house want to be?”

“I am trying to make a building which is like a smile on a person’s face…”

“Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.”

“Language, as an expressive phenomenon, is constitutive of consciousness. In this perspective, to learn to speak is to increasingly coexist with the environment. To live in an environment is, for the child, the incentive to recapture language and thought to make them his own. Thus, acquisition no longer resembles deciphering a text for which one would possess the code and key; rather, it is “deciphering” (deciphering without knowing the code).”

“I think it came out of the war, this tendency towards clearing the decks, cleaning everything up, having austerity and simplicity, making things minimal. I liked it in sculpture - Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Carl Andrea - I didn’t like it in buildings. If you went into houses like that, you felt as if you had to sit a certain way. I couldn’t imagine taking your jacket off and leaving it on a chair, or leaving your shoes while you got your slippers. It would just feel like you had to be more careful about things. Now people are doing it again. There’s a nouveau minimalism now, and it seems more ridiculous than the first time around.”

“Interactivity backgrounds its own artistic dimension when it concentrates on the function of the instrument to the detriment of the semblance expression. That’s what has happened when we hear the comment, all too common, from interactive art participants that the experience felt like a video game. You often feel there’s a trick you need to find and master, and once you’ve done that, you lose interest because you’ve got the feel of it and know how it “works”. When something loses intensity instead of becoming more compelling when you get the feel of it, it is a sure sign that it is operating more on a level of predefined objective function than fully lived relation.”

“The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.”

“The Gist — 2008 In utero, the body gives itself primarily to organism-assembly and only incidentally to actions and interactions. From infancy on, actions and interactions come increasingly to the fore while organism-assembly fades into the background. In any event, at all times forming – organism-assembly –happens in close association with doing – actions taken by the organism—, and doing always has some influence on forming. It may not be readily graspable and thus eludes everyday awareness but nonetheless it is the case that organism-assembly, the group of processes that together count as this, underlies all actions and interactions. Similarly, it is also subtly but surely the case that actions and interactions, which originate, after all, in relation to or even as organism-assembly processes, always indirectly affect organism-assembly, holding some degree of sway over it. What if from infancy on, actions could be made to bear more directly and regularly on organism-assembly? Having the means to approach and contribute to ongoing organism-assembly would certainly greatly advantage human beings in their continual struggle to remain viable. To be able to revisit and re-connect at will with organism-assembly would, in effect, be to have it within one’s power to go on indefinitely. The Arakawa + Gins team has spent four decades studying how architecture might best be used to sustain life.”

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

“The word “belief” is another error. It’s like the word “judgement”, they’re both horrible ideas, on which the world is based. I hope it won’t be like that on the moon!”

“Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned.”

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

“I’ve been a businessman for almost fifty years. It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer. I’ve never respected the profession.”

“Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.”

“For the dying ones, symmetry is the first claim and necessity of knowledge: for earth there is sky; for land, there is ocean; for subject there is object; for every distinguished this, there is that.”

“I haven’t been to the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn’t interest me, because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there.”

“Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live. Any subject taken in depth at once relates to other subjects.”

“Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Montaigne reached up to the ceiling of this library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas - There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer.” Montaigne, in effect, shed his Stoicism, and cast aside his fatalism. The thought of life, as the preparation for an afterlife, no longer concerned him. This moment marked, as Frampton notes, “a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.”

“It might be that one of the really significant problems of today’s culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization… Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.”

“We are still teaching our young people in institutional frameworks that come from a time they no longer recognize. Buildings, playgrounds, classrooms, lecture halls, campuses, libraries, laboratories, even forms of knowledge - these frameworks, I am saying, date from a time and were adapted to an era when both the world and humans were something they are no longer.”

“If humans move from one place to another by means of walking, if they perform the movement of grasping something, if they turn their eyes, if they speak, if they write, etc., they always perform movement and, thus, to educate movement would be to educate all of life.”

“Every classroom that penalizes students for distributed modes of attention organizes learning according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that sees the moving body as the distracted body is organized according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that teaches predominantly for one mode of perception is organizing its learning according to a norm. Every classroom that knows in advance what knowledge looks and sounds like is working to a norm.”

“For the child is a seeker and an inventor, always on the watch for novelty, impatient of rule, in short, closer to nature than is the grown man…let us cultivate a child’s knowledge in the child, and avoid smothering under an accumulation of dry leaves and branches, products of former vegetations, the new plant which asks nothing better than to grow.”

“In my opinion education has been far too much looked upon as the art of bringing up the individual - apart from the family and the community. From the individual we try to get the best yield; but it is as if a farmer were to endeavor for a few years to get the largest possible crops from a field without restoring to the land what he has taken from it: the field would eventually be exhausted.”

“Enjoyment does not come after learning, but learning and enjoyment come together.”

“In my own work at universities I have been much struck by the paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and un-utilized. It should be the chief aim of a university professor to exhibit himself in his own true character - that is, as an ignorant man thinking, actively utilizing his small share of knowledge. In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.”

“Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.”

“The main duty of education is to give to the mind a framework whereon to group the facts and ideas given us in the sequel by reading and experience.”

“The stage of romance is the stage of first apprehension. The subject-matter has the vividness of novelty; it holds within itself unexplored connections with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses and half-concealed by the wealth of material. In this stage knowledge is not dominated by systematic procedure…”

“Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

“Education must change because knowledge has changed…It seems very likely to me that the reinvention of digital tools from an educational perspective will lead to a reinvention of the web itself.”

“This is philosophy become the education of grownups. Children, having gained a common mastery of language, head off to school, where they learn more and increasingly more specific ways of talking: about languages and literatures, about flowers and projectiles, about historical change and economic, and more. It is later when all of this is more or less settled in place that we can be knocked down by the questions of Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau…and then we are all children again, looking in our lives, as it were from the outside. The education of grownups is their re-education, re-entering the grownup world. It may change. It may involve conversion.”

“So we walked on beside the philosopher, ashamed, compassionate, dissatisfied with ourselves, and more than ever convinced that the old man was right and that we had done him wrong. How remote now seemed the youthful dream of our educational institution; how clearly we saw the danger which we had hitherto escaped merely by good luck, namely, giving ourselves up body and soul to the educational system which forced itself upon our notice so enticingly, for the time when we entered the public schools up to that moment. How then had it come about that we had not taken our places in the chorus of its admirers? Perhaps merely because we were real students, and could still draw back from the rough-and-tumble, the pushing and struggling, the restless, ever-breaking waves of publicity, to seek refuge in our own little educational establishment; which, however, time would have soon swallowed up also.” - On The Future of Our Educational Institutions

“Every classroom that penalizes students for distributed modes of attention organizes learning according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that sees the moving body as the distracted body is organized according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that teaches predominantly for one mode of perception is organizing its learning according to a norm. Every classroom that knows in advance what knowledge looks and sounds like is working to a norm.” - Erin Manning

“Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.”

“In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.”

“The key to inventing through conversation is to ensure that the conversation is not … a sort of fight to the death between two set opinions. Each participant in the conversation must be free and open.”

“We sometimes proceed in a spiritual direction that is contrary to our talents; for a time, we struggle heroically against the tide and the wind, basically against ourselves: we become tired; whatever we accomplish brings no real joy. Indeed, we despair about our fertility, our future, perhaps in the midst of victory. Finally, finally, we turn around - and now the wind blows in our sail and drives us into our channel. What happiness! How certain of victory we feel! Now, for the first time, we know what we are and what we want; now we swear fidelity to ourselves and are permitted to do so - as those who know.”

“The archivization produces as much as it records the event.”

“The work of memory collapses time.”

“To pierce the mystery of the deep, it is sometimes necessary to regard the heights. It is earth’s hidden fire which appears at the summit of the volcano.”

“To the truly cultured man is vouchsafed the inestimable benefit of being able to remain faithful, without a break, to the contemplative instincts of childhood.”

“The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat (which we have described as occurring in the early activities of infantile mental life as well as among the events of psycho-analytic treatment) exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work. In the case of children’s play we seems to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of.”

“Philosophy should discover the meaning of phenomena described by the scientist {savant}. The role of philosophy is to reconstitute the world that the physicist sees, but with the "fringe” that the scientist does not mention that is furnished by his contact with the qualitative world. This program remains valuable for us; there will be no difference between psychology and philosophy. Psychology is always an implicit, beginning philosophy and philosophy has never finished its contact with facts.“

“We must be patient and await fresh methods and occasions of research. We must be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand that sciences shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views. We make take comfort, too, for the slow advances of our scientific knowledge in the words of the poet: 'what we cannot reach flying we must reaching limping…”