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It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations through publications in books, should gradually attain in later times, to the highest refinement of learning.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

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More quotes by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

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Some have held that there are only four winds: Solanus from the east Auster from the south Favonius from due west Septentrio from the north. But more careful investigators tell us that there are eight.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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For we must not build temples according to the same rules to all gods alike, since the performance of the sacred rites varies with the various gods.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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Consistency is found in that work whose whole and detail are suitable to the occasion. It arises from circumstance, custom, and nature.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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The difference between machines and engines is obviously this, that machines need more workmen and greater power to make them take effect, as for instance ballistae and the beams of presses. Engines, on the other hand, accomplish their purpose at the intelligent touch of a single workman...
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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The stone in quarries is found to be of different and unlike qualities. In some it is soft, in others it is medium, in still others it is hard as in lava quarries. There are also numerous other kinds: for instance, in Campania, red and black tufas in Umbria, Picenum, and Venetia, white tufa which can be cut with a toothed saw like wood.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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If then, at this great distance, our human vision can discern that sight, why, pray, are we to think that the divine splendor of the stars can be cast into darkness?
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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There are many names for winds derived from localities or from the squalls which sweep from rivers or down mountains.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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From the exterior face of the wall towers must be projected, from which an approaching enemy may be annoyed by weapons, from the embrasures of those towers, right and left.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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An architect ought to be an educated man so as to leave a more lasting remembrance in his treatises.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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Nothing suffers annihilation, but at dissolution there is a change, and things fall back to the essential element in which they were before.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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Proportion is that agreeable harmony between the several parts of a building, which is the result of a just and regular agreement of them with each other the height to the width, this to the length, and each of these to the whole.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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For not all things are practicable on identical principles
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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When it passes towards the east, the sun begins to have less effect upon it, and a thin line on the edge of its bright side emits its splendour towards the earth.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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In setting out the walls of a city the choice of a healthy situation is of the first importance: it should be on high ground, neither subject to fogs nor rains its aspects should be neither violently hot nor intensely cold, but temperate in both respects.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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There are also kinds of water that cause death, as they run through harmful juices in the soil and become poisonous.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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The proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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The construction of temples of the Ionic order to Juno, Diana, Father Bacchus, and the other gods of that kind, will be in keeping with the middle position which they hold for the building of such will be an appropriate combination of the severity of the Doric and the delicacy of the Corinthian.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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Noting all these things with the great delight which learning gives, we cannot but be stirred by these discoveries when we reflect upon the influence of them one by one.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio