Lewis Mumford Life Quotations

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

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.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

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.

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning.