Frank Lloyd Wright quotes:

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

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.

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

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.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

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.

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.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

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

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.

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

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.

Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

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.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

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.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

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.

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.

Space is the breath of art.

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

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

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.

I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

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

You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ...The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

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 longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.

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.

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.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.

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

If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

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

Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.

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.

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

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.

The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you're an atheist, pretend how God would do it.

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

I feel coming on a strange disease - humility.

I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

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

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.

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

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

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.

Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

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.

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.

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

An idea is salvation by imagination.

The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.

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

I know we can't have a great architecture while it is only for the landlord.

The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.

It's easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.

The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

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.

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

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.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal...

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...

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.

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. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented

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.

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.

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

The truth is more important than the facts.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.

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.

Self fulfilling prophecies do exist in real life

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

No stream rises higher than its source

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.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

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.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. - Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

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.

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.

Less is only more where more is no good.

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.

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.

A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if Nature is manifest there.

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.

We should learn from the snail: it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional.

Wood is universally beautiful to man. It is the most humanly intimate of all materials.

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.

The baby boomers are out there, they've had a lot of good years of earnings, they've inherited wealth. They are buying trophy homes and will be for years. We are one of those places people dream of. They come here to buy a piece of that dream.

It looked a lot worse than it was. Al is going to be released. He has vision and it's going to be day-by-day prognosis now. But it's much, much better than we initially anticipated.

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

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 space within becomes the reality of the building.

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?

'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.

More and more, so it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the building.

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.

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.

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.

I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.