Building Houses Quotes

• Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.

  N.D. Wilson

  Running, Epic, Climbing

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• People become house builders through building houses, harp players through playing the harp. We grow to be just by doing things which are just.

  Aristotle

  Player, People, Justice

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• Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with Jews building houses in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran.

  Burt Prelutsky

  Men, Israel, Iran

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• The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland.

  Edward Burnett Tylor

  People, Matter, Taste

  Edward Burnett Tylor (1861). “Anahuac; Or, Mexico and the Mexicans: Ancient and Modern”, p.42

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• The Bible talks about building houses on sand and rock, but says nothing about a brick house built on a blanket.

  Nicole McKay

  Rocks, Bricks, Sand

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• If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Plato, Ideas, Credit

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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• Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

  Aime Cesaire

  Book, Writing, Ties

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• The proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Class, Economy, Form

  "De architectura". Book by Vitruvius. Book I, Chapter II, Section 9,

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• I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Thinking, Osmosis

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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