Top 160 Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

52. “I never design a building before I’ve seen the site and met the people who will be using it.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

53. “Get the habit of analysis – analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

54. “Each material has its own message.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

55. “I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

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

— Frank Lloyd Wright

57. “I’ll bridge these hills with graceful arches.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

58. “Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

59. “I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

60. “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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

61. “Why should architecture or objects of art in the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

62. “Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

63. “A building is not just a place to be but a way to be.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

64. “Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

65. “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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

66. “Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

67. “Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

68. “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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

69. “Less is more only when more is too much.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

70. “Youth is not an age thing. It’s a quality. Once you’ve had it, you never lose it.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

71. “A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings if Nature is manifest there.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

72. “All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

73. “Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

74. “If it sells, it’s art.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

75. “Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

76. “No stream rises higher than its source.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

77. “To me, young has no meaning. It’s something you can do nothing about, nothing at all. But youth is a quality. And if you have it, you never lose it.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

78. “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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

79. “Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

80. “It’s easier to make changes with a pencil than a wrecking bar.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

81. “We should learn from the snail: it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

82. “Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

83. “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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

84. “Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

85. “If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

86. “Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

87. “Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

88. “Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

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

— Frank Lloyd Wright

90. “The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

91. “Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

92. “TV is chewing gum for the eyes.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

93. “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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

94. “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

95. “The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other. Continuity, plasticity, and all the new simplicity the imply have at last come home.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

96. “Mechanization best serves mediocrity.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

97. “Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds. Remy de Gourmont An idea is salvation by imagination.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

98. “The belief in a thing makes it happen.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

99. “God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said 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.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

100. “Imitate nothing except principle.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright