Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
Part 5

Frank Lloyd Wright
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.
Part 3

Frank Lloyd Wright
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?

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Mathematics in co-ordinated Form is architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Any good architect is by nature a physicist as a matter of fact, but as a matter of reality, as things are, he must be a philosopher and a physician.

Frank Lloyd Wright
You can study mathematics all your life and never do a bit of thinking.

Frank Lloyd Wright
If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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...

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
I saw the native home in Japan as a supreme study in elimination—not only of dirt, but the elimination of the insignificant…. I found this ancient Japanese dwelling to be a perfect example of the modern standardizing I had myself been working out.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?

Frank Lloyd Wright
I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, 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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright