Charles Eames Quotes

“Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.”

“Beyond the age of information, there is the age of choices.”

“Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.”

“Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”

“Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects... The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se. I don't believe in this 'gifted few' concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.”

“Genius? Nothing – we just worked harder.”

“Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.”

“In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.”

“It is almost impossible to reconcile self expression with the creative act.”

“It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad.”

“It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to do.”

“Most people aren’t trained to want to face the process of re-understanding a subject they already know. One must obtain not just literacy, but deep involvement and re-understanding.”

“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”

“Take your pleasures seriously.”

“The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.”

“The most important thing is that you love what you are doing, and the second that you are not afraid of where your next idea will lead.”

“The real questions are: Does it solve a problem? Is it serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?”

“To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.”

“We like to think we're pretty special, and, OK, in some respects maybe we are. And we like to think that we design for ourselves. And we do, we really do. But in the important ways we are really very much like a lot of other people. And if you are going to design for yourself, then you have to make sure you design deeply for yourself, because otherwise you are just designing for your eccentricities and that can never be satisfying to anyone else.”

“We work because it's a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.”

“Who ever said that pleasure wasn't functional?”

“Who is to say that pleasure is useless?”