Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

And I loved Frank Lloyd Wright. I think he was the greatest man I have ever met in my life. ~ Anthony Quinn

My affection for CinemaScope initially was my affection for the horizontal line as I learned it from having been apprenticed to an architect who was someone named Frank Lloyd Wright. ~ Nicholas Ray

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The room within is the great fact about the building. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

The real junk food is what Frank Lloyd Wright called light entertainment - bubblegum for the eye ... ~ John Geddes

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

How many understand that Nature is the essencial character of whatever is. It's something you'll find by looking not at, but in, always in. It's always inside the thing, and it makes the outside. And some day, when you get sufficiently proficient in understanding the use of the term, you can tell by the outside pretty much from what's inside.
[ ... ] But everything that's ever going to be of use to you in architecture or in life or anywhere you go or whatever you do is going to be Nature, in some of its immensely varied forms. So varied that there's no end to the variety imaginable.
"Nature" September 7, 1958 ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. "All Architecture, worthy the name," he decreed in 1910, "will, henceforward, more and more be organic."12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed - down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line - that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum; ~ Stewart Brand

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? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

No house should ever be on any hill ... It should be of the hill. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

Imitation is always insult--not flattery. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

The best friend of earth of man is the tree. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Coonskin caps and silly putty were just not going to cut it anymore. The good mother got her kids toys that were educational, that advanced gross and fine motor skills, that gave them the spatial sensibilities and design aptitude of Frank Lloyd Wright, and that taught Johnny how to read James Joyce at age three. God forbid that one second should pass where your child was idle and that you were not doing everything you could to promote his or her emotional, cognitive, imaginative, quantitative, or muscular development. ~ Susan Douglas

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

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

'Loving Frank' is about a forbidden love affair between two people who lived a hundred years ago - Frank Lloyd Wright and his married client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. The affair set off a colossal newspaper scandal when the lovers ran off to Europe together. ~ Nancy Horan

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Self fulfilling prophecies do exist in real life ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The best friend on earth of man is the tree: When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources of the earth. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

We are all affected by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini, and Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past. We evolve. ~ Richard Meier

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." Frank Lloyd Wright ~ Andrea Perron

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Now a work of art is a work of nature, but it is a work of human nature. It is a work of the mind: and it's a work of the mind in circumstances for an occasion which, to which, for which, and which it may be supremely natural and simple and effective.
"The Nature of Art" December 19, 1954 ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

It's easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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 ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

When I received my first paycheck from my now known day job, I spent it on a period Craftsman chair and a Frank Lloyd Wright-wannabe lamp. With my second paycheck, I bought a stereo. ~ Brad Pitt

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Love of an idea is the love of God. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox. ~ Jane Smiley

Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass - not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

If you're going to have centralization, why not have it! ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

We boast the highest standard of living when it's only the biggest. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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

Love is the greatest virtue of the heart. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The space within becomes the reality of the building. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

An idea is salvation by imagination ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

What is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that is most needed in life- Integrity. Just as it is in a human being, so integrity is the deepest quality in a building ... if we succeed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature- the psyche- of our democratic society ... Stand up for integrity in your building and you stand for integrity not only in the life of those who did the building but socially a reciprocal relationship is inevitable. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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 ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I think a lot of people have the Frank Lloyd Wright model in their brains. The architect comes in with this act of creation and lays it down, and that's it. But that's not me. ~ Thom Mayne

Freedom lies within. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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 ... ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

A building is not just a place to be but a way to be. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Man is a phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he matter, does he have any account whatever above the dust. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright