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Louis Sullivan Quotes

1856–1924 United States

Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, the "father of modernism", and a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright.

United States
Architects

Random Louis Sullivan quote

30 quotes

Verily, there needs a gardener, and many gardens.

Kindergarten Chats (1918)

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?

Kindergarten Chats (1918)

We must now heed the imperative voice of emotion.

The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896)

Truly we are face to face with great things.

Education (1902)

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

The true architectural art, that art toward which I would lead you, rests, not upon scholarship but upon human powers; and, therefore, it is to be tested, not by the fruits of scholarship, but by the touch-stone of humanity.

Kindergarten Chats (1918)

The greatest man of action is he who is the greatest, and a life-long, dreamer.

Education (1902)

He who knows naught of dreaming can, likewise, never attain the heights of power and possibility in persuading the mind to act.
He who dreams not creates not.

Education (1902)

He who dreamed of democracy, far back in a world of absolutism, was indeed heroic, and we of today awaken to the wonder of his dream.

All things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other.

The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896)

Nor am I of those who despise dreamers. For the world would be at the level of zero were it not for its dreamers - gone and of today.

And so shall your garden grow; from the rich soil of the humanities it will rise up and unfold in beauty in the pure air of the spirit.

Kindergarten Chats (1918)

No complete architecture has yet appeared in the history of the world because men, in this form of art alone, have obstinately sought to express themselves solely in terms either of the head or of the heart.

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Unceasingly the essence of things is taking shape in the matter of things, and this unspeakable process we call birth and growth.

The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896)

Thus would I concentrate the powers of will.

Education (1902)

Sagrada Familia...is the greatest piece of creative architecture in the last twenty-five years. It is spirit symbolised in stone!

A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay.

Education (1902)

Taste is one of the weaker words in our language. It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing; certainly it conveys no suggestion of potency. It savors of accomplishment, in the fashionable sense, not of power to accomplish in the creative sense.

Kindergarten Chats (1918)

High ideals make a people strong. … decay comes when ideals wane.

Education (1902)

I am of those who believe that gentleness is a greater, surer power than force, and that sympathy is a safer power by far than is intellect.

Education (1902)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Louis Sullivan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.