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

The truth is more important than the facts.

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.

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

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

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

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

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.

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

I believe totally in a Capitalist System, I only wish that someone would try it.

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

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

I feel coming on a strange disease - humility.

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.

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

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

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.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

Less is only more where more is no good.

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

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

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

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

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.

I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture.

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed... a race for rent.

The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

TV is chewing gum for the eyes.

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

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 follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

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

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

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

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.

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

The space within becomes the reality of the building.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that wore it.