"When the once-potent truth of architecture is reduced to a sign of its absence, one experiences a parching, suffocating dryness: The psyche lusts to be wet."

"When the depth of symbol is drained from it, brought to the surface, and flattened—the abyss into which it has fallen becomes visible: A gleam of light is the dry soul, wisest and best."

"When time itself is rendered meaningless by reversing its irreversible presence, then the practice of architecture becomes the case of the false pleading the cause of reconciliation: Pythagoras was the prince of imposters."

"As the night is sinking on realities that have had their day, one can still hear some lamenting a vanishing present.  Others rejoice at the luminous perspectives—fascinating both as threat and charm—that emanate from the empty and endless.  However, it is only when the processes that orient these transformations are themselves forgotten that consciousness is torn from its dogmatic slumbers by a return to the unoriginal.  The contradictions inherent in everything that starts only from beings express the resolute procedure that remains necessary after the idols have fallen.  What remains for those who no longer find greatness in architecture is either to deny it or to create it—for using the ideal as a model is a symptom of a dishonest life.  For those, like Nietzsche, for whom the nihilism of modernity is only a project to be overcome, a kind of unlikely spectre hovers—the Nemesis of the Vacant: for two thousand years humanity has been misled by a phantom picture.  'I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last man.  Nobody talks to me but myself and my voice comes to me like that of a dying person' (Nietzsche)."

"Architecture as a practice of control has projected over itself an immanent frame sufficient to reveal something without.  What is at first an oppressive flash in this system yields, in fact, the things that belong together.  Thus, the truths that have been disclosed in space are the very ones that have been inscribed upon the flesh.  This inscription, in the twentieth century, has been performed with all manner of precise instruments, including knives.  It has been observed that one secretly reserves a tendency to disparage this dire state until one has undergone it.  Architects too have suffered this ordeal by having followed orders—the resulting disorder is yet to be appropriated even if it has been diagnosed and foreseen.  The resource to surrogates is only a habit that can be given up.  One can refuse to substitute for the experience of unoriginality, things that one has never experienced but which are known through originals.  To substitute the 'essence' of architecture for its actual nonexistence would be futile and dishonest.  This work in search of architecture has discovered no permanent structure, no constant form, and no universal type.  I have realized that the result of this journey in search of the 'essentials' undermines, in the end, the very premise of their existence. Architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside.  It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate.  What emerges in differentiated experience is architecture as an index of the relationship between what was and what will be.  Architecture as nonexistent reality is a symbol, which in the process of consciousness leaves a trail of hieroglyphs in space and time that touch equivalent depth of unoriginality."

Daniel Libeskind