Famous Quotes

Quotes by 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.
• 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.
• A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.
• An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
• An idea is salvation by imagination.
• Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
• Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
• Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
• Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
• Freedom is from within.
• Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
• 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.
• I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
• If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
• Less is only more where more is no good.
• Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.
• 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.
• Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
• 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.
• New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.
• 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.
• Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
• 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.
• Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
• Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.
• Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
• Space is the breath of art.
• Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
• 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.
• The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
• 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.
• The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
• The truth is more important than the facts.
• TV is chewing gum for the eyes.