The space within becomes the reality of the building.

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

Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe.

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.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

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...

I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they’re learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting.

Less is only more where more is no good.

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

So I test all the buildings that I do by asking myself whether this building was possible, could have been built 50 years ago or a hundred years ago.

I feel coming on a strange disease – humility.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

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.

I think really good books can be read by anybody.

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

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

The interesting thing about Oberlin College as it differs from other more urban schools or universities is that it is a walking campus.

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...

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.

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

I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that’s about it.

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...

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

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.

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

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

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers – for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you...

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.

Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasions to change.

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

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

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

I believe Business Objects is on the cusp of becoming a multi-billion-dollar sales company. There is tremendous growth potential for business intelligence.

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

One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times.

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

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

God is in the details.

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

People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I’ve never heard of.

France needs to find something that makes it stand out. It’s not enough for it to do almost as well as its neighbors.

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

The only other thing which I think is important is: Don’t write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.

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.

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

Means must be subsidiary to ends and to our desire for dignity and value.

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

A good book written for children can be read by adults.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.