Best 164 quotes of Frank Lloyd Wright on MyQuotes

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

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?

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.

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

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

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 expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.

A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

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?

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth

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

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.

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.

Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

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.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

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

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.

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

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

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy

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.

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.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.

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

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.

Freedom is from within.

From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California.

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

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.

Good taste is not a substitute for knowledge

Greed in human nature may now come near to enslaving all humanity by means of the Machine - so fast and far has progress gone with it. This will be evident to anyone who stops to study the modern mechanistic Moloch and takes time to view it in its larger aspects.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I could list of dozens things my fiancee does that annoys me and I'm sure he could list off hundreds of things about me but the fact is that even through all that we love each other. We love each other in spite of our flaws and despite all the things we do that should make us hate each other we still continue to fall deeper in love. Sometimes we want to hate each other but for two people who are truly in love it simply isn't possible. Not even a little but, not even at all.

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 don't build a house without predicting the end of the present social order.

"I don't know whether you are a saint or a fool" said my lawyer. I replied "Is there a difference?