Frank Lloyd Wright quotes

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

Among the great modern architects, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn were arguably deists. ... Wright’s use of the word “nature” did not mean only what-we-find-outdoors. It was something deeper. Wright knew that when people speak of the “nature of things” they mean their very essence, the that-which-makes-them-what- they-are, which is always and only one step away from that-who-makes- them-what-they-are. ... Wright thought not that he was God but that he brought or allowed God into the world through what he did, creating and designing. ... Wright actually thought himself a prophet, which of course is a different to being God, or an angel. ... bringing God into the world in an act of something like mid-wifery from the womb of nature, is not at all Moses-like. It is not a bringing down of Law from on high after personal coaching from God, but a bringing forth of a God already there in potential. There is no presumption of having seen or met God of the Bible. One makes the God one believes in happen.

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.

New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

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.

The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

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

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

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

If you’re going to have centralization, why not have it!

The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.

A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call 'democracy' is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course..but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher.

New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.

God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often 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. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.

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

Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.

So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

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.