Frank Lloyd Wright > Quotes

“An idea is salvation by imagination”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright, Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture

“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

“Nature is my manifestation of God.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Early in my career...I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility... I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“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.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Television is chewing gum for the eyes.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House

“If it sells, it's art.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The truth is more important than the facts.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Less is more only when more is too much.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.”
― 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, The Natural House

“Freedom lies within.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The longer that I live the more beautiful life becomes.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. ”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Less is more only when more is too much”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The thing always happens that you really believe in and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Life is truth...”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands.

"Toward a New architecture" July 14, 1957”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“How many understand that Nature is the essencial character of whatever is. It's something you'll find by looking not at, but in, always in. It's always inside the thing, and it makes the outside. And some day, when you get sufficiently proficient in understanding the use of the term, you can tell by the outside pretty much from what's inside.
[...] But everything that's ever going to be of use to you in architecture or in life or anywhere you go or whatever you do is going to be Nature, in some of its immensely varied forms. So varied that there's no end to the variety imaginable.

"Nature" September 7, 1958”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“An idea is inevitably a coordination. It is a coming together of something that is separate or disorganized or incomplete. With an idea you begin to feel into the nature of that incompleteness.

"Nature and Idea" December 30, 1956”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express.

"Idea and Essence" September 7, 1958”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Now a work of art is a work of nature, but it is a work of human nature. It is a work of the mind: and it's a work of the mind in circumstances for an occasion which, to which, for which, and which it may be supremely natural and simple and effective.

"The Nature of Art" December 19, 1954”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciusly 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.

"The Wonderful World of Architecture"
February 22, 1959”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright