A Quote by Arnold J. Toynbee

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life. — © Arnold J. Toynbee
Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
I want to try to come away from that one directional, clear rectangular form. It's not used because it's the most beautiful form; it's just the practical thing. That's why our TVs are rectangles. Even in modern architecture, they want us to believe, "That's the nicest, most beautiful thing." I love modern architecture, but actually it's that they cannot afford amorphous shapes or ornaments.
I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.
The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest injustice that has been done to us, and has worked the greatest injury to the race.
When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.
Of all the ingenious mistakes into which erring man has fallen, perhaps none have been so pernicious in their consequences, or have brought so many evils into the world, as the popular opinion that the way of the transgressor is pleasant and easy.
One cannot deny that in former times man's life had been one of toil and hardship. It is correct to say, therefore, that modern civilization and the progress of science have greatly improved man's life and have brought comfort and ease in their trail.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is an ecological theory-founded on ecological observation by perhaps the greatest of all ecologists. It has been adopted by and brought up by the science of genetics, and ecologists, being modest people, are apt to forget their distinguished parenthood.
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.
To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
Society has always been the free man's greatest enemy. And the free man has been society's greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left behind.
Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.
The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.
My dad, he's definitely one of greatest writers of his generation. There is no question about it. When you are that good, when work is that good, you have to appreciate every aspect of it. It's the architecture of it, it's like looking at a Frank Lloyd Wright building or a Lautner building, it's master craftsmanship. Every aspect of it intertwines in a perfectly harmonious way. That's what architecture is at its best and the architecture of my father's music is on that level.
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