Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life demands creativity and improvisation without prior preparation.
This quote by Lewis Mumford suggests that life is akin to an artistic performance, where individuals must navigate through its complexities often without adequate preparation. It emphasizes the necessity of adapting and responding to life's challenges spontaneously, much like a musician who must perform a piece they have not fully mastered, highlighting the inherent unpredictability and artistry of human existence.
Themes
LifeArtImprovisationGrowthChallenges
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about embracing life's unpredictability.
More from Lewis Mumford
All quotes βNeither 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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