Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

Freedom lies within.

Great art has always, at first, been controversial. Now that our means of communication have multiplied, how much more so today?

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. ... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago's achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture.

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

Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece.

Different were the prophets of the human soul.

A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.

The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.

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

...there is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.

Again: I found repeatedly confirmed that the inferior mind not only learns by comparison, but loosely confers its superlatives, while the superior mind which learns by analysis refrains from superlatives.

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

"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"

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

give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities.