Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

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.

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

We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

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.

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

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

You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.

We should learn from the snail: it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional.

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.

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.

Simplicity and Repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

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

Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

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.

If you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Nature is the inspiration for all ornamentation

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.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

The truth is more important than the facts.

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.

Space is the breath of art.

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

I never design a building before I've seen the site and met the people who will be using it.

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

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

A building is not just a place to be but a way to be.

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

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.

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.

More and more, so it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the building.

I wouldnt mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

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.

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

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

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.

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.

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

If you're going to have centralization, why not have it!

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.

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.

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

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.

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