Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course.. but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

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

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright
So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get... what you regard as 'too far'—and when others follow, as they will, move on

Frank Lloyd Wright
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. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright
If you turned the country on its side, everything loose would fall into Southern California.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if Nature is manifest there.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.

Frank Lloyd Wright
God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often 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. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears — as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Frank Lloyd Wright
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.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.

Frank Lloyd Wright