Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

— Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks Quotes

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

— Charles Jencks

Cant you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?

— Charles Jencks

I was already writing about the idea of a ‘multiverse’ in the 1970s, though I might have called it the ‘pluriverse.’ How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

— Charles Jencks

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

— Charles Jencks

What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.

— Charles Jencks

It’s a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

— Charles Jencks

You have to believe in a placebo or it wont work, but if it works, its obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

— Charles Jencks

A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.

— Charles Jencks

I’ve been a lucky man. I’ve only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

— Charles Jencks

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it’s co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body – you can’t help but be moved.

— Charles Jencks

Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

— Charles Jencks

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is – certain, even dogmatic – until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

— Charles Jencks

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

— Charles Jencks

The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.

— Charles Jencks

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

— Charles Jencks

What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

— Charles Jencks

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

— Charles Jencks

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

— Charles Jencks
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