Louis Sullivan famous quotes

03-28-2025

Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Building #Persons
To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Teacher #Heart #Action
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

#Art #Eye #Looks
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

#Mean #Compassion #Liberty
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

#Dream #Past #Self
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

#Real #Love Is #Two
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

#Mean #Sacrifice #Men
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

#Men #Long #Mind
Words are most malignant, the most treacherous possession of mankind. They are saturated with the sorrows of all time.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Sorrow #Mankind #Possession
Man shall find his anchorage in self-recognition.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Men #Self #Recognition
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

#Men #Sound #Fabric
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

#Lying #Responsibility #Proud
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

#Depression #Tired #People
Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Mirrors #Architecture
Form follows function.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Fashion #Taste #Form
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

#Art #Healing #Inspire
But the building's identity resided in the ornament.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Identity #Ornaments #Architecture
It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Design #Individuality #Spirit
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

#Real #Intuition #Principles
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

#Mean #Light #Practice
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

#Mother #Art #Mean
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

#Art #Book #Hypocrisy
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

#Imagination #Vision #Needs
Form ever follows function.
-- Louis Sullivan

#Bad Ass #Ass #Form

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