Frank Lloyd Wright Art Quotations

No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

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.

The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.

The best friend of earth of man is the tree.

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

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said 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.

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.

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

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. - Virginia Woolf, from Jacob's Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Love is the greatest virtue of the heart.

Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

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.

The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.

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

The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture - if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful.

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

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

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

Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

If it sells, it's art.

I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.

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 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.

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.

Less is only more where more is no good.

'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

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.

Space is the breath of art.

Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

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.

You can't make an architect. But you can open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it.

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

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

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.

Think simple" as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.