Cass Gilbert Quotes

“I have always felt that architecture, painting and sculpture were so closely akin that the highest form of art would be the combination of them all. – Cass Gilbert

“The Capitol is the best work I have ever done, or shall ever do, and I am glad to have Given it to St. Paul.” – Cass Gilbert

“Public buildings best serve the public by being beautiful.” – Cass Gilbert

“He cultivated the right contacts, associated with up-to-date contractors and engineers, and hired competent designers—in many ways, Gilbert acted as a politician who skillfully satisfies a varied constituency.” – Sharon Irish, Gilbert scholar

“I am learning to live, and to see beauty in everything.” – Cass Gilbert, St. Anthême, France, 1880

“To become an Architect in the right sense of the word means that a man shall give his life to it and nothing else, and shall study the work he has to do with enthusiastic interest in every detail pertaining to it, and content himself with nothing less than complete success.” – Cass Gilbert, 1888

“I loved the excitement and the pleasures of life in New York, the opportunities for advancement, the pursuit of ambition, the theaters, the places of amusement, and such nights as the last I spent with you just as I was leaving for the West.” – Cass Gilbert to a New York friend—years later

“St. Clements Church was a labor of love. It was something more than a mere ‘job’. It was a thing that engaged my full endeavor and had come to mean a spiritual idea.” – Cass Gilbert, 1894

"Whoever had charge of the work subsequently certainly could have had no conception of how I feel about it...[An] architect's interest in his work is the same as that of a painter of a picture or the writer of a poem, and it ought not to be altered or marred by other hands." – Cass Gilbert, 1930 (36 years later)