Quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright

"Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."

"The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes."

"Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual."

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."

"Mechanization best serves mediocrity."

"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site."

"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."

"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."

"Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral."

"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."

"Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity."

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

"The truth is more important than the facts."

"Less is only more where more is no good."

"TV is chewing gum for the eyes."

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

"'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."

"Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world."

"Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed."

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

"Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now."

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

"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."

"God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said 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."

"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."

"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."

"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."

"Space is the breath of art."

"Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art."

"Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind."

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

"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."

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

"Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world."

"An idea is salvation by imagination."

"Freedom is from within."

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."

"New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent."

"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."

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

"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."

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