Lewis Mumford Quotes

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

My father could look straight ahead but concentrate on something on the very edge of his vision, almost nearly behind him.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.

I'm a student of media and I've always been one. I'm fascinated by the way we make the world around us based on pictures and how can we improve our perception of this picture world.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

I tried to pay attention, but attention paid me.

[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?

Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you're involved in that visual world, you can't really go backwards.