Top 15 Louis Sullivan Quotes

We are rounding out our absorbing study of Democracy. Thus, turning slowly upon the momentous axis of our theme, are we coming more and more fully into the light of our sun: the refulgent and resplendent and life-giving sun of our art — an art of aspirant democracy! Let us then be on our way; for our sun is climbing ever higher. Let us be adoing; lest it set before we know the glory and the import of its light, and we sink again into the twilight and the gloom from which we have come.

What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action?

I have warned you over and over that for every physical effect there is a psychic cause. You see the effect — the cause is just as visible. Can you imagine that Man is here made in the image of his Almighty, when he pollutes that which the Almighty, as it is said, has given to him when he pollutes even himself? This is not democracy, my lad, it is modern American inhumanity. This is not civilization, it is CALIBAN !

Taste is one of the weaker words in our language. It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing; certainly it conveys no suggestion of potency. It savors of accomplishment, in the fashionable sense, not of power to accomplish in the creative sense. It expresses a familiarity with what is au courant among persons of so-called culture, of so-called good form. It is essentially a second-hand word, and can have no place in the working vocabulary of those who demand thought and action at first hand. To say that a thing is tasty or tasteful is, practically, to say nothing at all.

The true architectural art, that art toward which I would lead you, rests, not upon scholarship but upon human powers; and, therefore, it is to be tested, not by the fruits of scholarship, but by the touch-stone of humanity.

The French have a saying: "Time will not consecrate that in which she has been ignored." Bear this admonition ever in mind for it is deeply true. And so, while I say we will neither hasten nor delay, let us not delay. All of which is summed up in the proverbs :

Is it not Canon Hole who says: "He who would have beautiful roses in his garden, must have beautiful roses in his heart: he must love them well and always"? So, the flowers of your field, in so far as I am gardener, shall come from my heart where they reside in much good will; and my eye and hand shall attend merely to the cultivating, the weeding, the fungous blight, the noxious insect of the air, and the harmful worm below. And so shall your garden grow; from the rich soil of the humanities it will rise up and unfold in beauty in the pure air of the spirit. So shall your thoughts take up the sap of strong and generous impulse, and grow and branch, and run and climb and spread, blooming and fruiting, each after its kind, each flowing toward the fulfillment of its normal and complete desire. Some will so grow as to hug the earth in modest beauty; others will rise, through sunshine and storm, through drought and winter's snows year after year, to tower in the sky; and the birds of the air will nest therein and bring forth their young. Such is the garden of the heart: so oft neglected and despised when fallow. Verily, there needs a gardener, and many gardens.

He who knows naught of dreaming can, likewise, never attain the heights of power and possibility in persuading the mind to act. He who dreams not creates not. For vapor must arise in the air before the rain can fall. The greatest man of action is he who is the greatest, and a life-long, dreamer. For in him the dreamer is fortified against destruction by a far-seeing eye, a virile mind, a strong will, a robust courage. And so has perished the kindly dreamer — on the cross or in the garret. A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay. Thus would I expand the sympathies of youth. Thus would I liberate and discipline all the constructive faculties of the mind and encourage true insight, true expression, real individuality. Thus would I concentrate the powers of will. Thus would I shape character. Thus would I make good citizens. And thus would I lay the foundations for a generation of real architects — real, because true, men, and dreamers in action.

I am not of those who believe in lackadaisical methods. On the contrary, I advocate a vigorous, thorough, exact mental training which shall fit the mind to expand upon and grasp large things and yet properly to perceive in their just relation the significance of small ones to discriminate accurately as to quantity and quality and thus to develop individual judgment, capacity and independence. But at the same time I am of those who believe that gentleness is a greater, surer power than force, and that sympathy is a safer power by far than is intellect. Therefore would I train the individual sympathies as carefully in all their delicate warmth and tenuity as I would develop the mind in alertness, poise and security. Nor am I of those who despise dreamers. For the world would be at the level of zero were it not for its dreamers gone and of today. He who dreamed of democracy, far back in a world of absolutism, was indeed heroic, and we of today awaken to the wonder of his dream.

High ideals make a people strong. … decay comes when ideals wane.

An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art. The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.

Truly we are face to face with great things. The mind of youth should be squarely turned to these phenomena. He should be told, as he regards them, how long and bitterly the race has struggled that he may have freedom. His mind should be prepared to cooperate in the far-reaching changes now under way, and which will appear to him in majestic simplicity, breadth and clearness when the sun of democracy shall have arisen but a little higher in the firmament of the race, illumining more steadily and deeply than now the mind and will of the individual, the minds and wills of the millions of men his own mind and his own will.

The tyranny alike of church and state has been curbed, and true power is now known to reside where forever it must remain — in the people.

After the long night, and longer twilight, we envisage a dawn-era: an era in which the minor law of tradition shall yield to the greater law of creation, in which the spirit of repression shall fail to repress. Man at last is become emancipated, and now is free to think, to feel, to act free to move toward the goal of the race. Humanitarianism slowly is dissolving the sway of utilitarianism, and an enlight- ened unselfishness is on its way to supersede a benighted rapacity. And all this, as a deep-down force in nature awakens to its strength, animating the growth and evolution of democracy. Under the beneficent sway of this power, the hold of illusion and suppression is passing; the urge of reality is looming in force, extent and penetration, and the individual now is free to become a man, in the highest sense, if so he wills.

Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling. It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.