Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

The best evidence of a mind is when you change it

There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.

When many people individually get what they want, the result may be something they collectively dislike.

Classical buildings endure because they are loved, admired and accepted, and enjoy an innate adaption to human needs and purposes.