Design quotes
2.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside design — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"God really does take our work seriously: It is wrong, it is a sin, to accept or remain in a position that you know is a mismatch for you. Perhaps that's a form of sin you've never considered - the sin of staying in the wrong job. But God did not place you on the earth to waste away your years in labor that does not employ his design or purpose for your life, no matter how much you may be getting paid for it."
"Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do."
"When we hire someone, even if they are going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers."
"The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."
"We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless."
"Acting without design, occupying oneself without making a business of it, finding the great in what is small and the many in the few, repaying injury with kindness, effecting difficult things while they are easy, and managing great things in their beginnings; this is the method of Tao."
"As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread."
"He who ruleth the raging of the sea, knows also how to check the designs of the ungodly. I submit myself with reverence to His Holy Will. O Abner, I fear my God, and I fear none but Him."
"A design may be called organic when there is an harmonious organization of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Within this definition there can be no vain ornamentation or superfluity, but the part of beauty is nonetheless great-in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the rational elegance of things intended for use."
"If you were the first person ever to design an application for the iPhone and you patented it, you would be very, very better off than we are right now, you know? But you've got to be the first one to do it. So I figured that Led Zeppelin or the Stones were going to do it unless we just got on to it. So I got cracking with the guys from Apple."
"You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people's characteristics so that you can design characters around what you've seen."
"I'm interested in designing for posterity."
"It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning."
"Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration."
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."
"Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems."
"Set the troops to their tasks without imparting your designs."
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That (a) the President of the United States is authorized to present, on behalf of the Congress, a gold medal of appropriate design to the family of the late Honorable Leo J. Ryan in recognition of his distinguished service as a Member of Congress and the fact of his untimely death by assassination while performing his responsibilities as a Member of the United States House of Representatives."
"The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy."
"What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful."
