“The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.”
As quoted in My Favorite Quotations (1990) by Norman Vincent Peale
Frank Lloyd Wright:
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Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
As quoted in The Wright Style (1992) by Carla Lind, p. 3
“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it.”
Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (1932) page 168
Context: 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.
Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes about art
“Night Is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun”
The Living City (1958)
Quote from an interview on the NBC television program, Wisdom- A Conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright (1953)
Context: I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course.. but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher.
Quote from an interview on the NBC television program, Wisdom- A Conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright (1953)
Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes about life
As quoted in The World's Best Thoughts on Life & Living (1981) compiled by Eugene Raudsepp; also quoted in The Michigan Daily http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1998/nov/11-10-98/arts/arts2.html (10 November 1998)
Quoted in A Living Architecture : Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects (2000) by John Rattenbury
Context: Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. 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.
Lecture to the Chicago Women’s Aid (1918); later published as "Chicago Culture" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941)
Context: It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth. … In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago’s achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Trending quotes
“I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature."”
As quoted in Quote magazine (14 August 1966)
Source: Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture
“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
(2021 rev. ed.), this quote was attributed to Wright in Art Spiegelman and Bob Schneider, Whole Grains: Book of Quotations (1973), but a similar quote was credited to Will Rogers in The Washington Post on May 17, 1964: "Tilt this country on end and everything loose will slide into Los Angeles."
Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_Yale_Book_of_Quotations/FtU4EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA906&printsec=frontcover New Yale Book of Quotations
Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes
“The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.”
Closing words, “Night is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun”
The Living City (1958)
Lecture to the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1904); later published as "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941) <!-- Duell, Sloan, & Pearce publishers -->
Context: 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.
“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
New York Times Magazine (4 October 1953) Sometimes paraphrased: "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
“There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.”
Anonymous saying, dating back at least to its citation in Natural Theology (1836) by Thomas Chalmers, Bk. II, Ch. III : On the Strength of the Evidences for a God in the Phenomena of Visible and External Nature, § 15, where the author states: "It has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense."; it has since become misattributed to particular people, including Frank Lloyd Wright.
Misattributed
“Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece.”
On Boston, The New York Times (27 November 1955)
“I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.”
Address at Evanston Illinois (8 August 1954)
“Earth”
The Living City (1958)
“Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.”
"In the Cause of Architecture", in The Architectural Record (March 1908)
As quoted in Truth Against the World : Frank Lloyd Wright speaks for an organic architecture (1987) edited by Patrick J. Meehan <!-- p. 29 -->
Context: God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often 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. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.
The Future of Architecture (1953), p. 174
The Living City (1958)
The Future of Architecture (1953)
As quoted in The Star (1959) and Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green.
“Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?”
On Philip Johnson’s glass house, as quoted in Architectural Digest (November 1985)
“New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.”
On New York and Pittsburgh, The New York Times (27 November 1955)
“If you’re going to have centralization, why not have it!”
On his designs for "The Illinois" a 528-story Chicago office building (10 September 1956)
“Social and Economic Disease”
The Living City (1958)
“Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.”
As quoted in The Duality of Vision : Genius and Versatility in the Arts (1970) by Walter Sorrell, p. 28
“All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.”
“Recapitulation”
The Living City (1958)
“Intellectual is not necessarily intelligent either.”
A Testament (1957)
A Testament (1957)
