Top 30 Louis Kahn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Even a brick wants to be something.”

— Louis Kahn

2. “We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.”

— Louis Kahn

3. “Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.”

— Louis Kahn

4. “A room is not a room without natural light.”

— Louis Kahn

5. “You can never learn anything that is not a part of yourself.”

— Louis Kahn

6. “I sense a Threshold: Light to Silence, Silence to Light – an ambiance of inspiration, in which the desire to be, to express, crosses with the possible Light to Silence, Silence to Light crosses in the sanctuary of art.”

— Louis Kahn

7. “Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.”

— Louis Kahn

8. “The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.”

— Louis Kahn

9. “You say to a brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says: ‘I like an arch.’”

— Louis Kahn

10. “How precious a book is in light of the offering, in the light of the one who has the privilege of this offering. The library tells you of this offering.”

— Louis Kahn

11. “The nature of space reflects what it wants to be.”

— Louis Kahn

12. “I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light. What is made by Light casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.”

— Louis Kahn

13. “The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.”

— Louis Kahn

14. “Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”

— Louis Kahn

15. “The room is the beginning of architecture.”

— Louis Kahn

16. “I try to create homes, not houses.”

— Louis Kahn

17. “Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another.”

— Louis Kahn

18. “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.”

— Louis Kahn

19. “Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.”

— Louis Kahn

20. “The first thing that an architect must do is to sense that every building you build is a world of its own, and that this world of its own serves an institution.”

— Louis Kahn

21. “All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.”

— Louis Kahn

22. “The crocodile must want to be a crocodile for reasons of the crocodile.”

— Louis Kahn

23. “A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.”

— Louis Kahn

24. “Architects in planning rooms today have forgotten their faith in natural light. Depending on the touch of a finger to a switch, they are satisfied with static light and forget the endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day.”

— Louis Kahn

25. “The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made.”

— Louis Kahn

26. “In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.”

— Louis Kahn

27. “I Use The Square To Begin My Solutions Because The Square Is A Non-choice, Really. In The Course Of Development, I Search For The Forces That Would Disprove The Square...”

— Louis Kahn

28. “I just want to make my last demand in reverence to the work of what has been done by architects of the past. what was, has always been. what is, has always been. and what will be, has always been. such is the nature of beginning.”

— Louis Kahn

29. “How accidental our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.”

— Louis Kahn

30. “Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.”

— Louis Kahn

31. “The person of old had the same brilliance of mind that we assume we have now. But that which made a thing become manifest for the first time is our great moment of creative happening.”

— Louis Kahn

32. “Just think, that man can claim a slice of the sun.”

— Louis Kahn

33. “If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it’s fine with me. I’m interested in good architecture as anybody else.”

— Louis Kahn

34. “Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.”

— Louis Kahn