Quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright


You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to have anything worth having.
– 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
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.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
An expert is a man who has stopped thinking - he knows!
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Freedom is from within.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Get the habit of analysis- analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
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.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I feel coming on a strange disease - humility.
– 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 have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anarchronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Less is only more where more is no good.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
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.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Space is the breath of art.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Television is chewing gum for the eyes.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
– 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
The room within is the great fact about the building.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fill 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
The space within becomes the reality of the building.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
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.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park.
– 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
Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll Le Corbusier go write four books about it.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The truth is more important than the facts.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
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
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
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
An idea is salvation by imagination.
– Frank Lloyd Wright