Home Design & Decorating Decorating Design Tips

Inspiring Quotes About Decorating

Brightly lit living room decorated with bookshelves and pillows

The Spruce / Michelle Becker

Quotes are popular because they can convey precise truths, inspire a wide range of emotions and trigger deep thought, usually all in the space of a dozen words or less.

Celebrate the love of decorating and design—and the love of decorating quotes—with us.

Home Decor Quotes

  • "Have nothing in your home that you don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." —William Morris
  • "One should never be the oldest thing in one's house." —Patsy Stone
  • “Be faithful to your own taste, because nothing you really like is ever out of style.” —Billy Baldwin
  • “Design is coming to grips with one's real lifestyle, one's real place in the world. Rooms should not be put together for show but to nourish one's well-being.” —Albert Hadley
  • “Decorating golden rule: Live with what you love.” —Unknown

Decorating Perfection Quotes

  • "A designer knows when he has reached perfection not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away." —Antione de Sainte-Exupery
  • “Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.” —Salvador Dali
  • "Everything has a place, and everything in its place." —Unknown
  • “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.” —Scott Adams

Comfortable Decor Quotes

  • “Make your home as comfortable and attractive as possible and then get on with living. There's more to life than decorating.” —Albert Hadley
  • “All rooms ought to look as if they were lived in, and to have so to say, a friendly welcome ready for the incomer.” —William Morris
  • “If you wait until you have enough money to decorate and make your home your own, it will never happen. If you wait until you can afford to buy everything new, you are missing the point. It is the old, the new, the hand-me-down, the collected, the worn but loved things in your home that make it your own.” —Stacy Risenmay, Not Just a Housewife
  • “Home is the nicest word there is.” —Laura Ingalls Wilder

Witty Decorating Quotes

  • “She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never condescended to construct a decoration.” —Anthony Trollope
  • “Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.” —Charles M. Schulz

Functional Decor Quotes

  • “Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.” —Steve Jobs
  • “Form follows function.” —Louis Sullivan
  • “Behind every attractive room, there should be a very good reason.” —Sister Parish
  • “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it is wrong.” —Richard Buckminster Fuller
  • “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.” —Philip Johnson
  • “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” —Leonardo Da Vinci
  • “Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.” —Charles Eames