Quotes from Frank Lloyd Wright

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. Form and function thus become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.

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.

Now a work of art is a work of nature, but it is a work of human nature. It is a work of the mind: and it's a work of the mind in circumstances for an occasion which, to which, for which, and which it may be supremely natural and simple and effective. "The Nature of Art" December 19, 1954

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.

What is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that is most needed in life- Integrity. Just as it is in a human being, so integrity is the deepest quality in a building...if we succeed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature- the psyche- of our democratic society...Stand up for integrity in your building and you stand for integrity not only in the life of those who did the building but socially a reciprocal relationship is inevitable.

The measure of its nobility and its continuity is its depth of feeling and its sincerity. And if it has that quality, it stands. "Toward a New architecture" July 14, 1957

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

The primitive ideals of centralization are now largely self-defeating. Human crucifixion by vertically on the now static checkerboard of the old city is pattern already in agony; yet for lack of any organic planing it is going on and on--not living, but rather hanging by its eyebrows from its nervous system.

The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.

You will find Goodness and Truth everywhere you go. If you have to choose, choose Truth. For that is closest to Earth. Keep close to the Earth, ...: in that lies strength. Simplicity of heart is just as necessary for an architect as for a farmer or a minister if the architect is going to build great buildings.

The belief in a thing makes it happen.

The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of the earth that the plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man's life upon earth can be made beautiful, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression!

Le génie est un péché contre la masse.

As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal - something we are to become - some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish.

There is release from anguish in action.

An expert is one who does not have to think. He knows.

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

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

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

Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.

Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.

Early in life I had to choose between arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

No house should ever be on a hill, or on anything. It should be of the hill. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.