“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“An idea is salvation by imagination”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“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
“I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.”
― 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
“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.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
“Nature is my manifestation of God.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Youth is not an age thing. It’s a quality. Once you’ve had it, you never lose it.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
― 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
“Television is chewing gum for the eyes.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Less is more only when more is too much.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“If it sells, it’s art.”
― Frank Lloyd
“Youth is a circumstance you can’t do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Imitation is always insult–not flattery.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Freedom lies within.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities.”
― 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
“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
“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
“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen”
― Frank Loyd 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
“The measure of a man’s culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.”
― 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
“The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“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
“Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. ”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“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
“An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“The longer that I live the more beautiful life becomes.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term ‘genius’ when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about. A poet, artist or architect, necessarily ‘understands’ in this sense and is likely, if not careful, to have the term ‘genius’ applied to him; in which case he will no longer be thought human, trustworthy or companionable.
Whatever may be his medium of expression he utters truth with manifest beauty of thought. If he is an architect, his building is natural. In him, philosophy and genius live by each other, but the combination is subject to popular suspicion and appellation ‘genius’ likely to settle him–so far as the public is concerned.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright
“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.”
― 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
“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. This of course not antagonistic by sympathetic to the growth of all men as brothers. Free emulation not imitation of the “bravest and the best” is to be expected of him. Uncommon he may and will and should become as inspiration to his fellows, not a reflection upon them, not to be resented but accepted–and in this lies the only condition of the common man’s survival. So only is he intrinsic to democracy.
Persistently holding quality above quantity only as he attempts to live a superior life of his own, and to whatsoever degree in whatever case he finds it; this is his virtue in a democracy such as ours was designed to be.
Only this sense of proportion affords tranquility of spirit, in itself beauty, in either character of action. Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm. The assumption of the “firm countenance, lips compressed” in denial or resentment is not known to her as it is known to civilization. Such negation by human countenance may be moral (civilization is inclined to morality) but even so not nature. Again exuberance is repose but never excess.”
― 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
“…there is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“…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
“Man in his upended street must know he is becoming a mere numerical item of convenience; on the way to being a thing. His inherent instinct for love and beauty is not only becoming suspect but, in spite of all intent, useless to society. He sees the human creature atrophy as he sees poverty of imagination in much “modern art,” so-called. But it was Walt Whitman himself who raised the perpendicular hand to declare: “It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” This is what is now coming forth in our architecture as in our life.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright