Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

It's easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.

The multitudinous substitutes for indigenous culture cannot grow. Having no roots, they can only age and decay. Studious, sincere youth retires, defeated. American youth, capable of becoming serious competent artists, under such pressure as this on every side, confused, try not to give up
or "fall in line." This is the nature of about all that can be called American education in the arts and architecture at this time. As for religion true to the teaching of the great redeemer who said "The Kingdom of God is within you"
that religion is yet to come: the concept true not only for the new reality of building but for the faith we call democracy.

Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?

'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.

I could list of dozens things my fiancee does that annoys me and I'm sure he could list off hundreds of things about me but the fact is that even through all that we love each other. We love each other in spite of our flaws and despite all the things we do that should make us hate each other we still continue to fall deeper in love. Sometimes we want to hate each other but for two people who are truly in love it simply isn't possible. Not even a little but, not even at all.

Nature is my manifestation of God.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.

The room within is the great fact about the building.

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ... The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension.

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.

Early in my career ... I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility ... I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind

Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism ... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the businessman it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality.

You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.

An idea is salvation by imagination

Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

We boast the highest standard of living when it's only the biggest.

Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.

Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but-instead-exalting the simple laws of common sense-or of super-sense if you prefer-determining form by way of the nature of materials ...

...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?
How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776?

It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth.

The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.

Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject
marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless
excess and the demoralization of the profit-system
yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great "eternal." Freedom is this "great becoming.

We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

"I don't know whether you are a saint or a fool" said my lawyer. I replied "Is there a difference?"

A free America ... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.

The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.

I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.

Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express.
"Idea and Essence" September 7, 1958

The longer that I live the more beautiful life becomes.

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.

No house should ever be on any hill ... It should be of the hill.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get ... what you regard as 'too far'
and when others follow, as they will, move on.

I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.

Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture - if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed ... a race for rent.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

Love is the virtue of the Heart,
Sincerity is the virtue of the Mind,
Decision is the virtue of the Will,
Courage is the virtue of the Spirit.

To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity.

Love of an idea is the love of God.

I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.

Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters.

The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple ... the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Space is the breath of art.

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.

A building is not just a place to be but a way to be.

Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey.

1. An honest ego in a healthy body
2. An eye to see nature
3. A heart to feel nature
4. Courage to follow nature
5. A sense of proportion (humor)
6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work
7. Fertility of imagination
8. Capacity for faith and rebellion
9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance
10. Instinctive cooperation

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

Freedom lies within.

From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.

Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.

The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.

I know we can't have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.

I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.

As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal - something we are to become - some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish.

The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you're an atheist, pretend how God would do it.

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men.
Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency?
Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority?

Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality.

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city.

I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.

Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy

Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part.

There is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.

A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Architecture is the frame of human existence. We must dedicate this existence more to beauty. For if poetic principle has deserted us, how long are we going to last?

A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.

Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you've got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is.