Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
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.
Less is only more where more is no good.
Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
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.
The truth is more important than the facts.
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
Space is the breath of art.
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.
Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
An idea is salvation by imagination.
Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
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.
Television is chewing gum for the eyes.
Freedom is from within.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
The space within becomes the reality of the building.
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
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.
All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
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.
Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.
TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
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.
A free America... 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.
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.
Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.
'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.
Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.
Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.
Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.
Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.
Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.
