There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful.

If i were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House.

A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.

...If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.

The greatest foe to art is luxury, art cannot live in its atmosphere.

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.