Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of experiencing beauty, mystery, and truth in life.
Lewis Mumford highlights that a day lacking in beauty, mystery, and a quest for truth leads to a diminished existence. He suggests that consistently living without these enriching experiences can be detrimental to our overall quality of life, stressing the necessity of engaging with the world in a meaningful way.
Themes
BeautyTruthMysteryExistenceLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of art, one might use this quote to highlight how art enriches life.
More from Lewis Mumford
All quotes →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 MumfordRead
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."We effectively became "time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers" with the invention of the clock."
Lewis MumfordRead
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 MumfordRead
The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.
Lewis MumfordRead
The very people who shudder over the cruelty of the hunter are apt to forget that slaughter, in the grimmest sense of the word, is a process they entrust daily to the butcher; and that unlike the game of the forests, even the dumbest creatures of the slaughterhouse know what is in store for them.
Lewis MumfordRead
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