Quote

Happiness, I think, lies on the surface... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.

Lewis Mumford

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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
Space
Plunge
Lying
Farther
Happiness
Disappear
Seems
Surface
Feels
Lies
Things
Gets
Buoyant
Think
Cold
Plunges
Thinking
Dark
Oppressive

More quotes by Lewis Mumford

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The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.
Lewis Mumford
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When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.
Lewis Mumford
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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
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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
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In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach.
Lewis Mumford
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The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.
Lewis Mumford
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Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
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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
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War is a specific product of civilization.
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A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.
Lewis Mumford
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The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
Lewis Mumford
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New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
Lewis Mumford
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The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
Lewis Mumford
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If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
Lewis Mumford
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Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth.
Lewis Mumford
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The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.
Lewis Mumford
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Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.
Lewis Mumford
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Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
Lewis Mumford
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Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
Lewis Mumford
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The final goal of human effort is man's self-transforma tion.
Lewis Mumford