Building is a sweet impoverishing. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
No good building without a good foundation. [ Proverb ]
An hour may destroy what an age was building. [ Proverb ]
All below is strength, and all above is grace. [ Dryden ]
When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability.
What do we then, but draw anew the model
In fewer offices; or, at least, desist
To build at all? [ William Shakespeare ]
The man who builds, and wants wherewith to pay,
Provides a home from which to run away. [ Dr. Young ]
Too low they build who build beneath the stars. [ Young ]
So work the honey-bees;
Creatures, that by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home.
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-ey'd justice, with his surly hum.
Delivering over to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone. [ William Shakespeare ]
Building and marrying of children are great wasters. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
The charges of building and making of gardens are unknown. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Ah, to build, to build! that is the noblest art of all the arts. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Not in pulling down, but in building up, does man find pure joy. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Old houses mended cost little less than new before they're ended. [ Gibber ]
Trifles lighter than straws are levers in the building up of character. [ Tupper ]
The building fitted accurately to answer its end will turn out to be admirable. [ Moller ]
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. [ Emerson ]
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? [ Bible ]
Houses are built to live in more than to look on; therefore let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had. [ Bacon ]
It is vain to trust in wrong; it is like erecting a building upon a frail foundation, and which will directly be sure to topple over. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Never build after you are five and forty; have five years' income in hand before you lay a brick; and always calculate the expense at double the estimate. [ Kett ]
The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past. [ Ruskin ]
Great, ever fruitful; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. [ Carlyle ]
Like one who draws the model of a house beyond his power to build it, who, half through, gives o'er, and leaves his part-created cost a naked subject to the weeping clouds. [ William Shakespeare ]
The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily placed as to exhibit a view of the whole design. [ Shenstone ]
I can see why it would be prohibited to throw most things off the top of the Empire State Building, but what's wrong with little bits of cheese? They probably break down into their various gases before they even hit. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
Be not too rash in the breaking of an inconvenient custom; as it was gotten, so leave it by degrees. Danger attends upon too sudden alterations; he that pulls down a bad building by the great may be ruined by the fall, but he that takes it down brick by brick may live to build a better. [ Quarles ]
Let the foundation of thy affection be virtue, then make the building as rich and as glorious as thou canst; if the foundation be beauty or wealth, and the building virtue, the foundation is too weak for the building, and it will fall: happy is he, the palace of whose affection is founded upon virtue, walled with riches, glazed with beauty, and roofed with honor. [ Quarles ]