Louis Sullivan Quotes & Sayings

Alas, the world has never known a sound social fabric, a fabric sound and clean to the core and kindly. For it has ever turned its back on Man. — Louis Sullivan

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour. — Louis Sullivan

To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action. — Louis Sullivan

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion. — Louis Sullivan

Happiness and depression cannot blossom on the same vine. Some people affirm their woes and beg for sympathy. Others, unfortunately, cast gloom wherever they go. These poor souls were born sick and tired. — Louis Sullivan

Form ever follows function. — Louis Sullivan

The building's identity resided in the ornament. — Louis Sullivan

Man shall find his anchorage in self-recognition. — Louis Sullivan

In the history of mankind there are recorded two great Inversions. The first, set forth by the Nazarene to the effect that love is a greater power and more real than vengeance. The second proclaimed the earth to be a sphere revolving in its course around the sun. These affirmations were made in the face of all evidence sacred to the contrary. — Louis Sullivan

An architect, to be a true exponent of his time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a poet ... this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all places and all times. — Louis Sullivan

National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S ... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon. — Louis Sullivan

A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions. — Louis Sullivan

How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. — Louis Sullivan

An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love. — Louis Sullivan

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time
is he who shall create poems in stone. — Louis Sullivan

The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation. — Louis Sullivan

What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action? — Louis Sullivan

What the people are within, the buildings express without. — Louis Sullivan

Words are most malignant, the most treacherous possession of mankind. They are saturated with the sorrows of all time. — Louis Sullivan

Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror. — Louis Sullivan

The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line. — Louis Sullivan

Implicit in true freedom of spirit lies a proud and virile will. Such glorious power of free will to choose, envisages beneficent social responsibility as manifest and welcome. — Louis Sullivan

Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant. — Louis Sullivan

If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected. — Louis Sullivan

The problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man. — Louis Sullivan

It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building. — Louis Sullivan

It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to its life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit. — Louis Sullivan