Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

American architect (1867-1959)

Frank Lloyd Wright (8 June 1867 – 9 April 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures, 532 of which were completed. Wright believed in designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its environment, with a philosophy he called organic architecture.

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Birth Name: Franklin Lincoln Wright

Alternative Names: Frank Lincoln Wright • F. L. Wright • Frank Lloyd Lincoln Wright • Frank Lloid Rait • Frank Luyd Rayt • Lloyd Wright Frank • FLW

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What means more to the life of the individual in our own place in Time than this study of the nature of human nature, the search to discover pertinent traces of hidden impulses of life, to form continually new abstractions uplifting the life he lives?

Thus the plausible expedient has become gospel and continues to be generally foisted upon those who seek better things; the conformities proclaimed by authority, however specious, temporarily mistaken for Godhead.

If it sells, it's art.

Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight is to his steps. The term "genius" when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about.

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.

Everywhere these inventions of science by ignorant misuse of a new technique were wiping out the artist.

I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature".

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

Everyone engaged in creative work is subject to persecution by the odious comparison. Odious comparisons dog the footsteps of all creation wherever the poetic principle is involved because the inferior mind learns only by comparisons; comparisons, usually equivocal, made by selfish interests each for the other. But the superior mind learns by analyses: the study of Nature.

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.

To me, young has no meaning. It’s something you can do nothing about, nothing at all. But youth is a quality. And if you have it, you never lose it.

The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more.

"Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject — marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless
excess and the demoralization of the profit-system — yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great "eternal." Freedom is this "great becoming.

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.

You will find Goodness and Truth everywhere you go. If you have to choose, choose Truth. For that is closest to Earth. Keep close to the Earth, ...: in that lies strength. Simplicity of heart is just as necessary for an architect as for a farmer or a minister if the architect is going to build great buildings.