Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes - Page 4

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

The best friend of earth of man is the tree.

A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.

You can't make an architect. But you can open the doors and windows toward the light as you see it.

Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you've got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is.

If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men and women have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men and women to capitalize their labor.

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?

I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.

To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity.

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.

All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.

I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.

The longer I lived, the more beautiful life became - despite my personal tragedies, the fire, despite my third wife and her dreadful taste. My dear Olgivanna, she insisted on replacing the lovely canvas and wooden trusses at Taliesin West with steel supports and pink frosted glass. Well, I was too old to care by then. What I decided early on was this: If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

'Think in simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

When I see architecture that moves me, I hear music in my inner ear

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

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.

Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture - if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful.

Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

Imitate nothing except principle.

One war only breeds another.

Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly.