Frank Lloyd Wright

"Votes are counted. Yes—but vision can neither be counted nor discounted."

"Both Art and Religion are on the way. Both must go hand in hand as ever before. Both together illuminating our sciences will constitute the soul of this civilization."

"Even though a disgrace, machine-made, ornament stayed and still thrives."

"No jealousy is comparable to professional jealousy."

"Exuberance to me early meant ecstacy of love, the poetic principle of life."

"Nature's own inexhaustible fertility is manifest exuberance, and never less than the elemental poetry of all her structure."

"There is nothing so timid as a million dollars."

"By being so far educated beyond his capacity is he unable to learn within himself from nature? Divorced as he is from her, who and what can now be his? Does the so-called free man of democracy merely exploit his sovereignity?"

"Architecture is intrinsic to Time, Place and Man."

"Science is inventive but creative never."

"Spirit is man's new power if he is to be truly mighty in his civilization."

"Only Art and Religion can bring this new vision as reality to a nation."

"The spiritual dignity of this new humane life for mankind is the Spirit of Man himself sacrosanct."

"Man either learns to usefor humanity his new facilities or he perishes by them."

"The petty bias of personal taste can no longer hide either excrescence or spiritual poverty in the name of style."

"Poetic is prophetic insight."

"Intellectual is not necessarily intelligent either."

"As melody is in music ornament is in architecture revelation of the poetic-principle, with character and significance."

"No! is always easier to say than Yes."

"... the huge business of education is not on speaking terms with culture and such culture as we now have is not on speaking terms with reality."

"Genuine expressions as essence of the great art itself cannot be taught or imitated. Nor can they in any way be forced."

"Great art has always, at first, been controversial. Now that our means of communication have multiplied, how much more so today?"

"Resemblances are mistaken for influences."

"Again: I found repeatedly confirmed that the inferior mind not only learns by comparison, but loosely confers its superlatives, while the superior mind which learns by analysis refrains from superlatives."

"I never had much respect for the collector's mind."

"The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears — as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy."

"New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him."

"“The-Shadow-of-the-Wall–Primitive Instincts Still Alive”"

"To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor."

"If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean."

"I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion."

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

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

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

"She was in a 'facility' which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright-pink and blue nestled in the hills-what artistry!"

"Among the great modern architects, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn were arguably deists. ... Wright's use of the word “nature” did not mean only what-we-find-outdoors. It was something deeper. Wright knew that when people speak of the “nature of things” they mean their very essence, the that-which-makes-them-what- they-are, which is always and only one step away from that-who-makes- them-what-they-are. ... Wright thought not that he was God but that he brought or allowed God into the world through what he did, creating and designing. ... Wright actually thought himself a prophet, which of course is a different to being God, or an angel. ... bringing God into the world in an act of something like mid-wifery from the womb of nature, is not at all Moses-like. It is not a bringing down of Law from on high after personal coaching from God, but a bringing forth of a God already there in potential. There is no presumption of having seen or met God of the Bible. One makes the God one believes in happen."

"He's the greatest architect of the nineteenth century."

"His place in history is secure. His continuing influence is assured. This country's architectural achievements would be unthinkable without him. He has been a teacher to us all."

"The social outcome of the arts and crafts movement was not commensurate with the needs of the new situation; as Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out in his memorable speech at Hull House in 1908, the machine itself was as much an instrument of art, in the hands of an artist, as were the simple tools and utensils."

"So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. I can't believe your song is gone so soon. I barely learned the tune"

"All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable."