Lewis Mumford Quotes

I think art teaches us how to feel, what our parameters can be, what sensations can be like; it makes you more engaged with life.

You know, the emotion - it comes in my art. The kind of person I am, I can deal with things, and I do and I can, but I'm not a crier.

Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Music bypasses the conceptual mind. Music does not give you food for thought.

Art makes better humans, art is necessary in understanding the world and art makes people happy. Undeniably, art is not optional.

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.

Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

Who would recognize the unhappy if grief had no language?

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

I always loved writing as a tool of expression.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Books written out of fire give me a great deal of pleasure. You get the sense that the world for these writers could not have continued if the book hadn't been written. When you come across a book like that it is a privilege.

Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

I always wanted to do a movie, because I love the movies. They give you a chance to have an intimacy with your audience that is different from stand up. With movies, you can bring the audience in with a close up, and emote in a different way.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

people's emotions are rarely put into words , far more often they are expressed through other cues. the key to intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels , tone of voice , gesture , facial expression and the like

What I am after, above all, is expression.