"The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more."

"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change."

"Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world."

"To me, young has no meaning. It’s something you can do nothing about, nothing at all. But youth is a quality. And if you have it, you never lose it."

"The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get... what you regard as 'too far'--and when others follow, as they will, move on."

"Man is a phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust."

"The longer that I live the more beautiful life becomes."

"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site."

"Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass — not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy."

"Space is the breath of art."

"Life is truth..."

"Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed."

"The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes."

"A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward."

"Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall."

"The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands. "Toward a New architecture" July 14, 1957"

"...there is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear."

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines — so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings."

"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

"I am a cage, in search of a bird."

"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

"I am free and that is why I am lost."

"A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die."

"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

"All language is but a poor translation."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity." [Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."

"Books are a narcotic."

"Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."

"Paths are made by walking"

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."

"Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."

"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us."

"I am in chains. Don't touch my chains."

"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves."

"Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself."

"Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have."

"I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness."

"They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong"

"I usually solve problems by letting them devour me."

"In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world."

"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart."