“The connection between the users and the act of building is direct. Either the people build for themselves, with their own hands, or else they talk directly to the craftsmen who build for them, with almost the same degree of control over the small details which are built. The whole emerges by itself and is continually repaired. Each person in a town knows that his own small acts help to create and to maintain the whole. Each person feels tied into society, and proud because of it.”

“We cannot be aware of these most precious moments when they are actually happening. In fact, the conscious effort to attain this quality, or to be free, or to be anything, the glance which this creates, will always spoil it. It is, instead, when we forget ourselves completely.”

“It is the process which creates the organism… if you want to make a living flower, you don't build it physically, with tweezers, cell by cell. You grow it from the seed.”

“Many people find it hard to make their design ideas precise. They are willing to express their ideas in loose, general terms, but are unwilling to express them with the precision needed to make them into patterns. Above all, they are unwilling to express them as abstract spatial relations among well-defined spatial parts.”

“When a language is shared, the individual patterns in the language are profound. The patterns are always simple. Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmission from person to person. There is nothing in these languages so complex that someone cannot understand it.”

“Each pattern is a field — not fixed, but a bundle of relationships, capable of being different each time that it occurs, yet deep enough to bestow life wherever it occurs… When we remember this, it may be easier to recognize how powerful they are — and that we do indeed, have our creative power as a result of the system of patterns which we have.”

“Every creative act relies on language. It is not only those creative acts which are part of a traditional society which rely on language: all creative acts rely on pattern languages: the fumbling inexperienced constructions of a novice are made within the language which he has. The works of idiosyncratic genius are also created within some part of language too. And the most ordinary roads and bridges are all built within a language too.”