Explore Quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright

The truth is more important than the facts.

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

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.

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

At night... the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.

Each material has its own message.

Wood is universally beautiful to man. It is the most humanly intimate of all materials.

Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.

The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.

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

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.

I do not believe in adding enrichment merely for the sake of enrichment. Unless it adds clearness to the enunciation of the theme, it is undesirable, for it is very little understood.

Nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

No stream rises higher than its source

It's easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.

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

I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly.

More and more, so it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the building.

We do not learn so much by our successes as we learn by failures - our own and others! Especially if we see the failures properly corrected.