Robert Bringhurst famous quotes

03-23-2025

By all means break the rules...
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Mean #Break
By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Mean #I Hate You #Break
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Crafts #Language #Typography
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 #Design #Musical
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Giving #Popularity #Process
Stories are the reproductive organs of language.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Stories #Language #Organs
Typography exists to honor content.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Design #Honor #Typography
A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Men #Sheep #Needs
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
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 ofÂ languageÂ linking timelessness and time.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Fashion #Order #Goal
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 oneâ€™s hands are fast enough.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Ocean #Mean #Hands
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
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
Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Design #Language #Typography
Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Wings #Constraints
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
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

#Taken #Thinking #World
Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Writing #Technology #Style
Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
-- Robert Bringhurst

#Writing #Purpose #Literature

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