100 Quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright, an American architect of unparalleled vision, redefined the possibilities of architectural design and space. Known for his philosophy of "organic architecture," Wright believed in creating structures that harmonized with their natural surroundings and embraced modern technology. His iconic works, such as "Fallingwater" and the Guggenheim Museum, showcase his innovative use of materials and distinctive geometric forms. Wright's emphasis on functionality and aesthetics laid the groundwork for the modernist architectural movement. While celebrated for his architectural genius, Wright's personal life was marked by controversy and complex relationships. His influence on the built environment, however, endures as a testament to his genius and his commitment to pushing the boundaries of what architecture could achieve.
Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes
Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. (Quote Meaning)
A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. (Meaning)
Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances. (Quote Meaning)
I feel coming on a strange disease - humility. (Meaning)
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.
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. (Quote Meaning)
We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.
Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. (Meaning)
You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.
A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if Nature is manifest there.
You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.
We should learn from the snail: it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional.
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.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. (Quote Meaning)
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.
Simplicity and repose are qualities of true architecture. (Meaning)
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization. (Quote Meaning)
Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.
When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change. (Meaning)
Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
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.
Nature is the inspiration for all ornamentation
If you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
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.
An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
The truth is more important than the facts. (Quote Meaning)
Space is the breath of art. (Meaning)
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. (Quote Meaning)
Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth
I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it.
Wood is universally beautiful to man. It is the most humanly intimate of all materials.
Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
A building is not just a place to be but a way to be. (Meaning)
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
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.
The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other. Continuity, plasticity, and all the new simplicity the imply have at last come home.
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.
More and more, so it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the building.
All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable. (Quote Meaning)
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
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.
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.
Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it.
The space within becomes the reality of the building. (Meaning)
If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men and women have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men and women to capitalize their labor.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
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.
Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. (Quote Meaning)
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.
I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.
How many understand that Nature is the essential 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.
Less is only more where more is no good. (Meaning)
I attend the greatest of all Churches. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church.
An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.
Think in simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.
As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.
The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.
Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.
You can't make an architect. But you can open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it.
If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.
Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
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.
TV is chewing gum for the eyes. (Quote Meaning)
A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.
Each material has its own message.
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.
If it sells, it's art.
An idea is salvation by imagination. (Meaning)
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.
The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.
The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you're an atheist, pretend how God would do it.
At night... the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.
No stream rises higher than its source (Quote Meaning)
Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity
It's easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.
Freedom is from within. (Meaning)
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?
Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.
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.
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.
Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
The best friend of earth of man is the tree.
Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.
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
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor. (Quote Meaning)
Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him.
Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.
Nature is my manifestation of God. (Meaning)
A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.
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.
No house should ever be on any hill... It should be of the hill.
Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. (Quote Meaning)
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts.
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.
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.
The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple...the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century.
One war only breeds another.
Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun. (Meaning)
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.
Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.
Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.
I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.
The room within is the great fact about the building.
Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly.
I find that government can be a kind of gangsterism and is in Russia. And is likely to be in America if we don't take care of ourselves pretty carefully.
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.
By playing down to the idea of the common man, dogmatic political authority exploits him... So the ideal of innate aristocracy of which hour forefathers dreamed is betrayed for votes in the name of democracy.
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.
I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.
"I don't know whether you are a saint or a fool" said my lawyer. I replied "Is there a difference?"
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.
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.
Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense. (Quote Meaning)
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. (Meaning)
Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm.
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?
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.
Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way.
Nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
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.
Imitate nothing except principle.
Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination
Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy
Less is more only when more is too much. (Quote Meaning)
When I see architecture that moves me, I hear music in my inner ear
Imitation is always insult--not flattery.
I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.
Good taste is not a substitute for knowledge
Television is bubble-gum for the mind.
Love of an idea is the love of God.
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.
Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Love is the greatest virtue of the heart.
New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.
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.
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.
The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.
I know we can't have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.
A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration.
I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches
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 Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
