“Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”

“...the multitudinous substitutes for indigenous culture cannot grow. Having no roots, they can only age and decay. Studious, sincere youth retires, defeated. American youth, capable of becoming serious competent artists, under such pressure as this on every side, confused, try not to give up--or "fall in line." This is the nature of about all that can be called American education in the arts and architecture at this time. As for religion true to the teaching of the great redeemer who said "The Kingdom of God is within you"--that religion is yet to come: the concept true not only for the new reality of building but for the faith we call democracy.”

“Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express."Idea and Essence" September 7, 1958”

“Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.”

“The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get... what you regard as 'too far'--and when others follow, as they will, move on.”

“You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.”

“give me the luxuries of life and I will gladly do without the necessities.”