Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis MumfordRead
Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that the quality of experiences in life is more important than the quantity of time lived.
Lewis Mumford highlights the significance of rich and meaningful experiences in life over mere longevity. He suggests that younger individuals often embrace life with an intensity that can overshadow their awareness of mortality, while older individuals may have experienced life more fully and thus have a different perspective on death. This introspection invites readers to reflect on how they define a fulfilling life and the experiences that contribute to it.
Themes
ExperienceLifeMortalityIntensityYouthElderly
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about living life to the fullest.
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.
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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."
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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.
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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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