Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator who is considered one of the most prominent figures in modern architecture. He was born in Wisconsin and began his career as a draftsman in Chicago. He later established his own architectural practice and became known for his Prairie School style, which emphasized clean lines, natural materials, and integration with the surrounding landscape.
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Wright designed many iconic buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and the Unity Temple in Illinois. He also designed furniture and decorative elements to complement his buildings.
Wright’s work was not without controversy, as his unconventional designs often challenged traditional architectural conventions. He was known for his strong opinions and clashes with clients, which sometimes led to projects being cancelled or abandoned.
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Despite these challenges, Wright’s legacy has endured, and he is considered one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. He believed in the importance of creating structures that were both functional and beautiful, and his innovative approach to design continues to inspire architects and designers today.
These inspiring quotes will take you on a journey of architectural brilliance and environmental consciousness.
Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes
1. “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
2. “I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”
3. “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
4. “The truth is more important than the facts.”
5. “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.”
6. “Nature is the inspiration for all ornamentation.”
7. “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.”
8. “You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.”
9. “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.”
10. “When I see architecture that moves me, I hear music in my inner ear.”
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11. “Freedom is from within.”
12. “An idea is salvation by imagination.”
13. “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.”
14. “The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
15. “More and more, so it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the building.”
16. “Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master’s work of art. Individuality is sacred.”
17. “Space is the breath of art.”
18. “There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
19. “Wood is universally beautiful to man. It is the most humanly intimate of all materials.”
20. “Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”
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21. “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.”
22. “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
23. “If you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”
24. “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.”
25. “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”
26. “The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you’re an atheist, pretend how God would do it.”
27. “Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.”
28. “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.”
29. “I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work.”
30. “Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.”
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31. “The best friend on earth of man is the tree: When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources of the earth.”
32. “A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”
33. “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.”
34. “Doctors bury their mistakes, Architects cover them with ivy.”
35. “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.”
36. “I attend the greatest of all Churches. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church.”
37. “We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.”
38. “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an expert.”
39. “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.”
40. “Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly.”
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41. “Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.”
42. “Love of an idea is the love of God.”
43. “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?”
44. “Less is only more where more is no good.”
45. “All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.”
46. “I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.”
47. “Youth is a circumstance you can’t do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”
48. “Get the habit of analysis – analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.”
49. “I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.”
50. “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.”
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51. “I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.”
52. “The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.”
53. “I’ll bridge these hills with graceful arches.”
54. “I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.”
55. “Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth.”
56. “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.”
57. “Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?”
58. “Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.”
59. “A building is not just a place to be but a way to be.”
60. “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
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61. “Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”
62. “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.”
63. “Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.”
64. “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.”
65. “A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if Nature is manifest there.”
66. “All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.”
67. “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.”
68. “Each material has its own message.”
69. “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.”
70. “If it sells, it’s art.”
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71. “Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.”
72. “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.”
73. “Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.”
74. “The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.”
75. “Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.”
76. “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.”
77. “If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.”
78. “Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.”— Frank Lloyd Wright
79. “Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”
80. “Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.”
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81. “Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.”
82. “Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.”
83. “No stream rises higher than its source.”
84. “The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.”
85. “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.”
86. “TV is chewing gum for the eyes.”
87. “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.”
88. “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”
89. “It’s easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.”
90. “Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination.”
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91. “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.”
92. “The belief in a thing makes it happen.”
93. “Imitate nothing except principle.”
94. “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.”
95. “Self fulfilling prophecies do exist in real life.”
96. “I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.”
97. “Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.”
98. “Television is bubble-gum for the mind.”
99. “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.”
100. “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.”