26+ Robert Bringhurst Quotes On Power, Religion And Art

Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian poet, linguist, typographer, and author. He is best known for his work on native American oral traditions and his translations of works by Haida and other Northwest Coast poets. Bringhurst has also published several collections of his own poetry, and his work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Bringhurst on power, religion, life.

Top 10 Robert Bringhurst Quotes

1. Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
2. Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.
3. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
4. When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.
5. 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 one’s hands are fast enough.
6. Typography exists to honor content.
7. 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.
8. Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
9. Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.
10. Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

Robert Bringhurst Quotes About Language

Stories are the reproductive organs of language. — Robert Bringhurst

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

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

Robert Bringhurst Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

By all means break the rules. — Robert Bringhurst

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

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

To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all? — Robert Bringhurst

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

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

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. — Robert Bringhurst

With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine. — Robert Bringhurst

Life Lessons by Robert Bringhurst

1. Robert Bringhurst's work emphasizes the importance of preserving language and culture, highlighting the need to respect and celebrate the diversity of human experience.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of using language to express ideas and emotions, and the power of words to shape our understanding of the world.
3. Lastly, his work celebrates the beauty of nature and the power of storytelling, emphasizing the need to connect with our environment and to share stories with one another.