Robert Bringhurst Quotes

Quotes about:

• By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.

  Robert Bringhurst

  I Hate You, Mean, Typography

  "The Elements of Typographic Style". Book by Robert Bringhurst, 1992.

  48 Copy quote

• Typography exists to honor content.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Design, Honor, Typography

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• Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Space, Choices, Arbitrary

  13 Copy quote

• When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

  Robert Bringhurst

  Writing, Thinking, People

  16 Copy quote

• In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Horse, Jobs, Book

  17 Copy quote

• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Independent, Hands, Years

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• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Crafts, Language, Typography

  "15 Free Fonts That Harken Back To Vintage Typography" by Katherine Brooks, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 7, 2014.

  20 Copy quote

• Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Design, Durability, Language

  10 Copy quote

• Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Ocean, Mean, Hands

  7 Copy quote

• Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Opportunity, Endless Opportunities, Design

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• When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Culture, Enough, Given

  7 Copy quote

• If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Peace, Taken, Thinking

  14 Copy quote

• In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Fashion, Order, Goal

  "The Elements of Typographic Style". Book by Robert Bringhurst, www.theguardian.com. 1992.

  9 Copy quote

• To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?

  Robert Bringhurst

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Essay on Adam" There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam. The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth, fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth, nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these is only an issue of whether the demons work from the inside out or from the outside in: the one theological question.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Simple, Two, Differences

  Robert Bringhurst (2010). “Selected Poems”, p.33, Random House

  13 Copy quote

• Stories are the reproductive organs of language.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Stories, Language, Organs

  Robert Bringhurst (2004). “Prosodies of Meaning: Literary Form in Native North America”, University of Manitoba Press

  9 Copy quote

• Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Wings, Constraints

  Robert Bringhurst (2004). “Prosodies of Meaning: Literary Form in Native North America”, University of Manitoba Press

  9 Copy quote

• I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Thinking, Long, Together

  10 Copy quote

• My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Hunting, Trying, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true.

  Robert Bringhurst

  People, Income, Poet

  7 Copy quote

• In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Dark, Men, Space

  9 Copy quote

• Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Thinking, Way, Made

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• If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Writing, Thinking, Civilization

  8 Copy quote

• We're into the era of desktop bureaucracy, where people sit at computers building websites and analyzing data rather than listening or reading.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Reading, People, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• By all means break the rules.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Mean, Typography, Break

  "The Elements of Typographic Style". Book by Robert Bringhurst, 1992.

  8 Copy quote

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