Top 100 Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes
#1. You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#2. An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#3. Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#5. 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
#6. The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#7. The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#8. The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands.
"Toward a New architecture" July 14, 1957
Frank Lloyd Wright
#10. 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
#11. Nature is my manifestation of God.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#12. "I don't know whether you are a saint or a fool" said my lawyer. I replied "Is there a difference?"
Frank Lloyd Wright
#13. I do not believe in adding enrichment merely for the sake of enrichment. Unless it adds clearness to the enunciation of the theme, it is undesirable, for it is very little understood.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#14. Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#15. When anyone becomes an authority, that is the end of him as far as development is concerned.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#16. 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
#17. New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed ... a race for rent.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#18. Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity
Frank Lloyd Wright
#19. 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
#21. 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
#24. If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#25. 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
#26. The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#28. Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#29. The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#30. 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
#31. Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#32. Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#34. Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?
Frank Lloyd Wright
#35. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#36. Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#37. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#38. Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#39. A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#40. 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
#41. Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. When I see architecture that moves me, I hear music in my inner ear
Frank Lloyd Wright
#49. You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#51. They turned the country up on its side, and everything loose fell into California.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#52. From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#53. Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#56. 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
#57. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#58. Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#61. For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity ...
Frank Lloyd Wright
#65. '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
#66. 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
#67. I attend the greatest of all Churches. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#77. All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#78. The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#79. 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
#80. To me, young has no meaning. It's something you can do nothing about, nothing at all. But youth is a quality. And if you have it, you never lose it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#81. We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#82. 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.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#83. I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#85. Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#86. There is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#89. Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#90. We do not learn so much by our successes as we learn by failures - our own and others! Especially if we see the failures properly corrected.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#93. Taste is a matter of ignorance. If you know what you are tasting, you don't have to taste.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#94. Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#95. A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if Nature is manifest there.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
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