Quotes from Daniel Libeskind

We all came to see that site. We all walked around it. It is already sacred.

And of course I like Berlin a lot. It's such an interesting city.

Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

I'm not Candide, nor Dr Pangloss, but we know that faith moves mountains.

Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

There are more people living in Lower Manhattan now than before the terrorist attacks. That's faith for you. There's such a strong spirit here.

And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

The stranger is often a person who can see and understand the context much better than a person who has lived there for a thousand years

Gaining experience is good, but it is also an obstacle because in some ways you have to forget what you know. You have to cease being an expert in order to do something new and something good.

I think it is much better not to have a goal, but rather to have a path. I think it is much better not to have a goal, but rather to have a path. Taking the path is very vulnerable and threatened by being pulled to the left or to the right, but if you stay on this thin and narrow, straight path, something of an adventure, something of meaning will happen to you

Follow the things you love! Follow the things that you are intensely passionate about. Follow the things that you like to do, which often to others might seem unimportant.

The Spiral Gallery may happen, too. It is not dependent on government funding.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

It's a fantastic responsibility and a wonderful moment.

Don't look at the superficial success, at the short-term success. Look at the deep spiritual questions that architecture has to answer. Who do you build for? Where? What should you build?

Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.