A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
A free America… 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 man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn’t afterward.
All fine architectural values 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.
An idea is salvation by imagination.
Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.
Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
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.
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.
Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.
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.
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
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. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
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.
New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent.
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
No stream rises higher than its source. What ever 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.
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.
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.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
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.
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Television is chewing gum for the eyes.
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 architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.
The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines – so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
The space within becomes the reality of the building.
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
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 over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
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.
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.
TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
Well, now that he’s finished one building, he’ll go write four books about it.
Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.
Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.
