Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright

American Architect, Interior Designer, Writer and Educator

"Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived."

"Art and religion are the soul of our civilization. Go to them, for there love exists and endures."

"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles."

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

"The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas."

"No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. It was no more than what he felt. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built... His philosophy, true or false, is there."

"The truth is more important than the facts."

"What is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that is most needed in life - integrity."

"Television is chewing gum for the eyes."

"The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen."

"Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old."

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

"Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall."

"Form and function are one."

"An idea is salvation by imagination."

"An expert is a man who has stopped thinking – he knows."

"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. "

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. "

"Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. "

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

"Space is the breath of art. "

"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. "

"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. "

"1. An honest ego in a healthy body. 2. An eye to see nature. 3. A heart to feel nature. 4. Courage to follow nature. 5. A sense of proportion (humor). 6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work. 7. Fertility of imagination. 8. Capacity for faith and rebellion. 9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance. 10. Instinctive cooperation."

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines."

"A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, 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."

"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 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."

"Abandon it. [how to improve Pittsburgh]"

"A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working."

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

"Again in America we erect temples but this time not so much to the mystery of great terrestrial or cosmic forces as to the interior or spirit-power of manhood as released by American democracy and its sciences."

"All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account."

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

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

"Architectural features of true democratic ground-freedom would rise naturally from topography, which means that buildings would all take on the nature and character of the ground on which in endless variety they would stand and be component part."

"An idea is inevitably a coordination. It is a coming together of something that is separate or disorganized or incomplete. With an idea you begin to feel into the nature of that incompleteness."

"Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed."

"Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind."

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

"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."

"As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means."

"Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency? Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority?"

"Business is like riding a bicycle. Either you keep moving or you fall down."

"Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece."

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

"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."

"Continuously nature shows him the science of her remarkable economy of structure in mineral and vegetable constructions to go with the unspoiled character everywhere apparent in her forms."