Television is bubble-gum for the mind.
Frank Lloyd WrightRead
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the noise of the city with the natural sounds that once brought joy, highlighting a different kind of happiness.
In this quote, Frank Lloyd Wright reflects on the overwhelming sounds of urban life that fill a person's senses, suggesting a superficial, yet content state of happiness amidst the chaos. It juxtaposes the once soothing and harmonious sounds of nature and loved ones with the mechanical noise of the city, illustrating how one can find a peculiar sense of joy, or 'sidewalk-happiness', even in an environment that is starkly different from the tranquility of nature.
In practice
During a city planning conference discussing urban happiness.
Television is bubble-gum for the mind.
Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.
Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it.
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer.
Each in the most hidden sack kept the lost jewels of memory, intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses, the fragment of public or private happiness. A few, the wolves, collected thighs, other men loved the dawn scratching mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers. For me happiness was to share singing, praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes. I ask forgiveness for my bad ways: my life had no use on earth.
Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed; _x000D_ What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
From it (the Rosary) the young will draw fresh energy with which to control the rebellious tendencies to evil and to preserve intact the stainless purity of the soul. Also in it, the old will again find repose, relief, and peace from their anxious cares. And to all those who suffer in any way, especially the dying, may it bring comfort and increase the hope of eternal happiness.
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
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