Frank Lloyd Wright: Trending quotes (page 5)

“In every new expression of a fundamental Idea there will always be the substitutes, the imitations, dangling from it, as the soiled fringe from a good garment.”

“Thus the plausible expedient has become gospel and continues to be generally foisted upon those who seek better things; the conformities proclaimed by authority, however specious, temporarily mistaken for Godhead.”

“I then believed critics were by nature no less confused than confusing.”

“See the last chapter in Genesis where Cain, the murderer of his brother, went forth with his sons to found the city. The City is still murdering his brother.”

“Between the radical and the conformist lies all the difference between a lithe tendon and a length of gas-pipe.”

“Servility increases—already a seemingly unguarded danger to democracy not only in art and architecture and religion but in all phases of life.”

“This drift toward quantity instead of quality is largely distortion. Conformity is always too convenient? Quality means individuality, is therefore difficult. But unless we go deeper now, quantity at expense to quality will be our national tragedy—the rise of mediocrity into high places.”

“Might not the spirit of creative art, desperately needed by man, lie in the proper use of the radical new technologies of our times, and so arise?”

“What means more to the life of the individual in our own place in Time than this study of the nature of human nature, the search to discover pertinent traces of hidden impulses of life, to form continually new abstractions uplifting the life he lives?”

“If the abstraction is truly made well above the animal nature in man—his gregarious nature—it will keep the ancient rituals of his higher nature as long as possible. Human abstractions if true usually become ritual.”

“Success was misunderstood as essential to progress. Really success was worse than failure.”

“Different were the prophets of the human soul.”

“But soon this saving virtue appeared to me in our disgraceful dilemma: Realization that any true cultural significance our American free society could know lay in the proper use of the machine as a tool and used only as a tool.”

“Everywhere these inventions of science by ignorant misuse of a new technique were wiping out the artist.”

“To survive, our American art was cheating itself of life.”

“So the poet in the engineer and the engineer in the poet and both in the architect may be seen here working together, lifelong.”

“Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight is to his steps. The term "genius" when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about.”

“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.”