Charles Eames Quotations

The details are not the details. They make the design.

Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.

Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.

Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.

To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.

The real questions are: Does it solve a problem? Is it serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.

It is almost impossible to reconcile self expression with the creative act.

Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.

It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to do.

It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad.

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

We work because it's a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.