Talk:Frank Lloyd Wright

"You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve that which is worth having."

Using Google Books, I was able to trace this quote to The Shining Brow: Frank Lloyd Wright, but with the snippet view, I couldn't tell if it was a quote from Frank Lloyd Wright, or about Frank Lloyd Wright from his widow. Can anyone look into this further? --Jacob J. Walker (talk) 13:02, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced or inadequately sourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Frank Lloyd Wright. --Antiquary 18:59, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

• 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.

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

• A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality.

• All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account.
  • Said after he returned from a South American trip with Saarinen, a fellow architect.

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

• An expert is a man who has stopped thinking — he knows!

• An idea is salvation by imagination.
  • This is from Wright's book Two Lectures on Architecture --Hughh (talk) 19:59, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

• Architecture is the triumph of Human Imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word "order."

• Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.
  • This quote occurs in a book entitled "Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas", Paperback, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Editor), and Gerald Nordland (Editor) available here:http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Lloyd-Wright-Realm-Ideas/dp/0809314223/ref=sr_1_299?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395773998&sr=1-299&keywords=frank+lloyd+wright+books. Unfortunately my copy was lost in a flood so I cannot check the references in the back of the book nor can I recover the page number. As I recall, the quote was spoken (or written)with regards to bureaucrats in Marin County, CA regarding their required alterations to the court house designed by Wright.

• Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

• Chewing gum for the eyes.
  • On television; occasional variant: Chewing gum for the mind.

• Classicism is a mask and does not reflect transition. How can such a static expression allow interpretation of human life as we know it? A fire house should not resemble a French Chateau, a bank a Greek temple and a university a Gothic Cathedral. All of the '-isms' are imposition on life itself, by way of previous education.

• Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

• Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

• Don't eat it. It will kill you before your time. Avoid it.
  • On pepper

• Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. (1939)

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

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

• Freedom is from within.

• Get the habit of analysis — analysis will, in time, enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.

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

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

• He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head.
  • Referring to an unnamed, well-known architect of Wright's day.

• I believe totally in a capitalist system, I only wish that someone would try it.

• I can see the sham — but where's the rock?
  • Commenting on the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas

• I feel coming on a strange disease — humility.

• I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture. (1931)

• I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.
  • On Marilyn Monroe

• I would like to have a free architecture. Architecture that belonged where you see it standing — and is a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.

• I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking.

• I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

• I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant, because I don't believe there are many [great architects] — if any. For 500 years what we call architecture has been phony.

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

• If you don't get an idea on the site on the first day, you're not going to get one.
  • Mentioned on multiple occasions by Brian MacKay-Lyons as something Frank Lloyd Wright said. Question is, is it true?

• It (New York City) is a great monument to the power of money and greed…a race for rent.

• Less is only more where more is no good.

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

• Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

• Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

• Move the table.
  • Wright's response to a client who phoned him to complain of rain leaking through the roof of the house onto the dining table; also quoted as "Move the chair."

• 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.

• No stream rises higher than its source. Whatever man might build, could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.

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

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

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

• Space is the breath of art.

• Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity.

• The architect must be a prophet… a prophet in the true sense of the term. If he can't see at least ten years ahead, don't call him an "architect."

• The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

• 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.

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

• The one on my board right now.
  • When asked which of his buildings was the most beautiful.

• The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.

• The space within becomes the reality of the building.
  • Variant: The room within is the great fact about the building.

• The truth is more important than the facts.

• There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

• "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.

• Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

• Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

• True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented.

• We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

• Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.
  • About Le Corbusier.

• Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

• Why organize it!
  • When asked in a radio interview in the 1950s what he thought of Organized Christianity.

• Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.