"You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having."
Frank Lloyd Wright, who took his first breath 145 years ago today, is frequently regarded as modern history's greatest architect, having masterminded the Guggenheim Museum, Fallingwater, and a number of other iconic structures. He was also, unbeknownst to many, a formidable graphic artist. More than a legendary creator, however, he was also a deep, broad thinker of crisp conviction and wide-spanning wisdom. Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotationsis lovely pocket-sized micro-tome from Pomegranate (previously), edited by Frank Lloyd Wright Archives director Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, meticulously culling more than 200 of Wright's most memorable quotes from his published writings and his famous Sunday morning talks, which followed the Saturday evening dinners and film screenings he held at his Taliesin studio. The quotes are divided into subjects like Nature, Work & Success, Beauty, Democracy & Individual, and Creativity, but among his keenest insights explore education and learning. Here are ten of my favorites.
The present education system is the trampling of the herd. (1956)
True study is a form of experience. (1958)(Cue in Sir Ken Robinson on the industrialization of education.)
Cultivate the poet. The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of this universe and the sooner we knock under to that the better. Get Emerson's essay on the American scholar and read it once a year. (1957)Culture is developed from within and education is to be groomed from without. (1959)(Cue in William Gibson on cultivating a personal micro-culture.)
When anyone becomes an authority, that is the end of him as far as development is concerned. (1948)Education, of course, is always based on what was. Education shows you what has been and leaves you to make the deduction as to what may be. Education as we pursue it cannot prophesy, and does not. (1955)An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he knows.' (1957)You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having. (1958)There is no real development without integrity, that is – a love of truth. (1957)(Cue in this morning's Richard Feynman commencement address on integrity.)
And, finally, an affirmation of networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity:
Quality consists in a developed consciousness and in a capacity for complete correlation of your faculties. If you are not a correlated human being, you are fragmentary, you are awkward, you are not there in any sense with the thing that is needed to be there. (1952)