Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Frank Lloyd Wright - Page 3

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.

The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple...the engine, the motor and the battleship the works of the century.

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.

I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.

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.

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

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.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

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

Nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.

Humanity to me is not a mob. A mob is a degeneration of humanity. A mob is humanity going the wrong way.

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

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.

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.

Less is more only when more is too much.

One war only breeds another.

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.

Imitation is always insult--not flattery.

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.

When I see architecture that moves me, I hear music in my inner ear

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.

Television is bubble-gum for the mind.

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.

All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.

The longer I lived, the more beautiful life became - despite my personal tragedies, the fire, despite my third wife and her dreadful taste. My dear Olgivanna, she insisted on replacing the lovely canvas and wooden trusses at Taliesin West with steel supports and pink frosted glass. Well, I was too old to care by then. What I decided early on was this: 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.

I'll bridge these hills with graceful arches

The room within is the great fact about the building.

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

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.

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?

Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy

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.

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.

San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful.

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.

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.

It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth.

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.

I voted for Stevenson as opposed to Eisenhower because I thought he would make a good president, but against my conscience because I thought that he was too good for the job.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but-instead-exalting the simple laws of common sense-or of super-sense if you prefer-determining form by way of the nature of materials.

When anyone becomes an authority, that is the end of him as far as development is concerned.

'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.

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

Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm.

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.

Love is the greatest virtue of the heart.

They turned the country up on its side, and everything loose fell into California.

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.

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.

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.

Love of an idea is the love of God.

A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration.

If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall.

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.

Imitate nothing except principle.

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

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 physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.