“Swift, in his ‘Letters to a Young Clergyman,’ says:  ’I cannot forbear warning you in the most earnest manner against endeavoring at wit in your sermons, because, by the strictest computation, it is very near a million to one that you have none.’  Perhaps that would be good advice to all who consciously seek for what is called originality, which is mostly attained by exaggeration, disproportion, and oddness of arrangement; real originality only comes from original minds, and will in that case show itself properly and naturally, just as wit shows itself spontaneously in the witty; for surely those original architects, who have only been able to raise in us emotions of contempt or disgust, would have been judicious had they abstained from the attempt.  I think that most architectural students, if they will only study the best buildings, will make their plans to accurately answer the purposes wanted, including the efficient lighting of the rooms, will study the Vitruvian symmetry until their eye revolts from disproportion, will try and make their profiles tell the story they want told, and will try and bring such parts that, from the exigencies of the case, obtrude themselves in odd places into harmony with the whole, that they will produce an effect which will raise their buildings to the dignity of humanity, and out of the range of the dog-kennel and rabbit-hutch type, and will not exhibit ugliness, disproportion, or vulgarity.  We see plenty of examples where the designs have sunk much below this level; no building of dead walls, with holes in it for doors and windows, could cause us such disgust.  Let me here say, by way of a parenthesis, that if you candidly consider that your design is more offensive than a dead wall, do not waste money and materials in making the wall more repulsive, but let it alone.”

“Any one can be original if he be only impudent enough; any one can be graceful if he is servile enough to copy:  but to be both original and graceful requires deep study, much striving, and natural talent.”

“I have also to remind you that architecture cannot be brought into vigorous life again, so long as architects insist on using old forms for beauty that are inseparable from a construction that has been abandoned; so long as this practice persists, so long will architecture be a kind of potted art; to be vigorous it must learn how to take the materials, and construction that would be ordinarily used in buildings for purely practical purposes, and give to these materials and this construction forms that will excite the proper emotions.  You must not suppose that I mean that if you have a vast hall, or what not, that because you can put an iron trussed roof over it from wall to wall, that this will make it into a hall that will raise emotions.  You will only get a rail-way platform or a coal shed.  You have got to set your wits to work to see how it can be properly brought within the pale of aesthetics, and not only as to