Quote collection
216 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?"
"Freedom is from within."
"The longer I lived, the more beautiful life became - despite my personal tragedies, the fire, despite my third wife and her dreadful taste. My dear Olgivanna, she insisted on replacing the lovely canvas and wooden trusses at Taliesin West with steel supports and pink frosted glass. Well, I was too old to care by then. What I decided early on was this: 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."
"Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall."
"For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity."
"Architecture is essentially Human; it is the Human spirit manifesting itself. For when a Man builds, there, you've got him; you know exactly what, who and how that Man is."
"To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity."
"Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy."
"The best friend of earth of man is the tree."
"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions."
"Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see."
"The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it."
"The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get... what you regard as 'too far' - and when others follow, as they will, move on"
"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."
"Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him."
"I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work."
"Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine."
"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 house should ever be on any hill... It should be of the hill."
"Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture."