Quote

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

Lewis Mumford

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lewis Mumford
Age: 94 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 19
Died: 1990
Died: January 26
Architect
Architectural Theoretician
Historian
Historian Of Technology
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Flushing
Long Island
Ultimate
Conscious
Mystery
Consciousness
Sense
Life
Encompasses
Gift

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

Image
Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
Lewis Mumford
Image
A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
Image
The fact that order and creativity are complementary has been basic to man's cultural development for he has to internalize order to be able to give external form to his creativity.
Lewis Mumford
Image
I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!
Lewis Mumford
Image
War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas.
Lewis Mumford
Image
If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents.
Lewis Mumford
Image
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Lewis Mumford
Image
War is a specific product of civilization.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
Lewis Mumford
Image
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved.
Lewis Mumford
Image
In our entrancement with the motorcar, we have forgotten how much more efficient and how much more flexible the footwalker is.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Man's Chief purpose is the creation and preservation of values that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Neither democracy nor effective representation is possible until each participant in the group...devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
Lewis Mumford
Image
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training...
Lewis Mumford