Quotations

A great source for Frank Lloyd Wright quotes is in his collection of speeches available in the book Truth Against the World. Highly recommended if you want to read some of his original words. His autobiography is also a good source of quotes.

• I could see the very tall building only in the country. And Broadacre City, as agrarian as it was urban, was eventually the answer I found to this spectacular folly of prevalent commercial vanity. (Autobiography, Book 5: THE STAMPEDE, pg. 500)

• TV is chewing gum for the eyes. (About.com)

• As one consequence of the ugly publicity given the terrible tragedy hundreds of letters had come to me from all over the country. I tied them up together into a bundle now and burned them. Unread. I went to work. The salt and savor of life had not been lost. That salt and savor will always be the work one does best. (Autobiography, Book 3: WORK--AGAIN pg. 190)

• In giving lectures, if that is what they are, I've found that I do my best if I do not make preparation for them whatsoever. (Autobiography, Book 5: ENGLAND--LONDON pg. 535)

• Committee decisions are seldom above mediocre unless the committee is dominated by some strong individual. (Autobiography, Book 3: THE FIRST PROTESTANT, pg. 152)

• AGAIN, Taliesin! Three times built, twice destroyed, yet a place of great repose. When I am away from it, like some rubber band stretched out but ready to snap back immediately the pull is relaxed or released, I get back to it happy to be there again. (Autobiography, Book 4: TALIESIN III, pg. 368)

• We do not learn much by our successes: we learn most by failures—our own and others', especially if we see the failures properly corrected. (Autobiography, Book 5: REHEARSALS, pg. 428)

• Inevitably our American colleges and universities are similar to enlarged Trade Schools—all qualifying the youth of the nation to cog in somewhere in the commercialized social machine, and so—earn money. (Autobiography, Book 5: THE CASHANDCARRY)

• In Beethoven's music I sense a master mind, fully conscious of the qualities of heartful soaring imagination that are god-like in a man. The striving for entity, oneness in diversity, depth in design, repose in the final expression of the whole—all these are there in common pattern between architect and musician. (Autobiography, Beethoven)

• I told Rabbi Cohen that I couldn't just build him a synagogue but that I would build him an American synagogue, for American worship. (Together They Built a Mountain, pg. 58)

• When all was well with the new life at Taliesin, during my first two years of life there, whenever I would go to Chicago to keep track of my work I would take time somehow to go out to Oak Park. I would go there after dark, not wishing to be seen. Go to reassure myself that all was going well there too—with the children. (Autobiography, Book 4: Belated Memories)

• I, still the hungry orphan turned loose in the bakeshop, spent about two hours there and bought it all for fifty thousand dollars. (Autobiography, Japan—Tokio, referring to Japanese prints)

• There may be more awful threat to human happiness than earthquake. I do not know what it can be. (Autobiography, Building Against Doomsday referring to Imperial Hotel)

• Only as science becomes as one with the spirit of man can a culture or a civilization live indefinitely. Science can take things apart, but only art and religion can put them together again—to live. (Truth Against the World, 1/22/58, pg. 141)

• It is true that nature never puts an idea of Form into practice, plants a new type or species, that she doesn't plant its natural enemy beside it. (Autobiography, Book 5: Heresy)

• What is style? Every flower has it; every animal has it; every individual worthy the name has it in some degree, no matter how much sandpaper may have done for him. ... This quality of style is a subtle thing, and should remain so, and not to be defined in itself so much as to be regarded as a result of artistic integrity. (Studies and Executed Buildings)

• I somehow got the money and paid him. I would resist the next adventure into art and craft, perhaps resist for several months. But this self-denial would not last. So, always, the necessities were going by default to save the luxuries until I hardly knew which were necessities and which luxuries. (Autobiography, Book 3: Groceries, Rent)

• And ever since I discovered the print Japan had appealed to me as the most romantic, artistic, nature-inspired country on earth. Later I found that Japanese art and architecture really did have organic character. (Autobiography, Book 3: Japanese Prints)

• Is it a quality? Fatherhood? If so, I seemed born without it. (Autobiography, Book 2: Fatherhood)

• By the Eternal. These monuments! Will we never make an end of such banality, such profanity? (Autobiography, referring to the monument at the grave of Louis Sullivan)

• No man ever deserves much praise usually. No matter how good he may be, he's never as good as he thinks he is, possibly, but he's twice as good as other people think he is after all. (October 4, 1951)

• It is true that the Japanese approach to any matter is a spiral. Their instinct for attack in any direction is oblique and volute. But they make up for it in gentleness and cleverness and loyalty. Yes, the loyalty of the retainer to his Samurai. They soon educated us and all went pretty well. (Autobiography pg. 217, discussing the construction of the Imperial Hotel.)

• Suppose we go to the moon? What is the moon but a carcass, and what is all this thing to do for us in the end except to maybe make it foolish to go to war again, in which case it is very well done. But I doubt if it will accomplish that. (October 21, 1957, in response to a question about interplanetary activity.)

• To stay with a good piece of work in the field or a building requires more stamina than football because football is showing off and field work or building is a kind of skilled sacrifice to nothing immediate but something stored up in the Future. The man who plants a tree knows something of this non-showing but deeply satisfying aspect of work. (Autobiography, discussing philosophy behind Taliesin Fellowship)

• I saw Silsbee was just making pictures. And not very close to what was real in the building—that I could see, myself. But I adored Silsbee just the same. He had style. (Autobiography)

• Romeo, as you will see, will do all the work and Juliet cuddle along-side to support and exalt him. Romeo takes the side of the blast and Juliet will entertain the school children. Let's let it go at that. No symbol should be taken too far. (Autobiography, Romeo and Juliet Windmill)

• I wanted a home where icicles by invitation might beautify the eaves. So there were no gutters. (Autobiography, referring to Taliesin)

• I wished to be part of my beloved southern Wisconsin, too. I did not want to put my small part of it out of countenance. Architecture, after all, I have learned—or before all, I should say—is no less a weaving and a fabric than the trees are. And as anyone might see, a beech tree is a beech tree. It isn't trying to be an oak. Nor is a pine trying to be a birch, although each makes the other more beautiful when seen together. (Autobiography)

• My father was a musician and a preacher. He taught me to see a great symphony as an edifice, an edifice of sound, you see. So when I listen to Beethoven, who is the greatest architect who ever lived, I never fail to see buildings. He was building all the time. He was a great composer also. So never miss the idea that architecture and music belong together. They are practically one. (October 21, 1957)

• So I think that to decentralize today you have not only got to go out as far as you dare go but five times as far. And the city then will get you before it passes away unless the blast released with the H-bomb happens along. Sometimes, don't you think that would be, perhaps, merciful? (May 27, 1954)

• Now there's not much use in building a beautiful building and swamping it with a sea of motorcars. Unless the motorcar problem is first of all solved—approached and saved—I see no reason [to] build beautiful, expensive, monumental buildings. (October, 1958)

• God knows we are the most materialistic of all modern civilizations on earth today. We are looking too much down along our own noses and so we don't see very far into the future. But we've soon got to realize that this materialism we're championing, living upon, and calling success is not bona fide. It can't last and won't result in the happiness or growth of the soul of the human being. It's temporal beyond all words, menial in culture beyond anything the world has yet seen. Unless something happens to allow that to develop in us which I believe is there, I have faith in, and I know it's in these youngsters sitting here in front of me now, we shall be the shortest lived civilization in all history. (Southern Conference on Hospital Planning, May 1949, Truth Against the World, pg. 185)

• Now I believe architecture to be the humanizing of building. The more humane, the more rich and significant, inviting, and charming your architecture becomes, the more truly is it the great basis of a true culture. Unless it is true architecture in this sense, the less it's architecture at all. (September, 1954)

• Simplicity in art, rightly understood, is a synthetic, positive quality in which we may see evidence of mind, breadth of scheme, wealth of detail, and withal a sense of completeness found in a tree or a flower. A work may have the delicacies of a rare orchid or the staunch fortitude of the oak and still be simple. A thing to be simple needs only to be true to itself in organic sense. (March, 1901)

• And nature doesn't mean out-of-doors, you know—nature doesn't mean horses and cows and streams and storms only—that's only one little element. Nature means the essential significant life of the thing, whatever the thing is. That thumb of mine, what's the nature of the thumb? Why is this nail on the thumb? It's the why, the questioning concerned with the very life and character of whatever is, that is the study of nature. (1957)

• [Architectural] Competitions have never yet given the world anything worth having. [...] Now, the reason is this—one reason, this isn't the only reason, in every competition that goes through, the committee is first of all an average. [...] Then, the committee goes through the exhibit, picks out the best designs and the worst ones, and throws them out. Why? Because they can't get together on the best one. That one is always a minority report. You see? The best ones have to go. The worst ones have to go. Then there is the average. (May, 1949)

• We have got to make of this country a great beautiful civilization or we will be the shortest one in history because our scientific advantages have been so exaggerated; they have so far outrun our spiritual interpretations and so far gone ahead of everything that we know or feel within ourselves that we don't know where we are. (October 21, 1957)

• The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.

• Now, I've been right about a good many things—that's the basis of a good deal of my arrogance. And it has a basis, that's one thing I can say for my arrogance.

• The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. 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. (Although this quote is widely attributed to Wright, I have not beeen able to find the source.)

• God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often 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. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing. (Truth Against the World, pg. 29)