Lewis Mumford Quotes

The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

It is impossible for human beings not to view something subjectively.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

We are artists. We are all subjective people; we have a point of view. It doesn't mean we are right.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

The world is how we see the world. Some people see the world good, the other people see the world bad. Every person has an idea of the world with a subjective [viewpoint].

I never believe I'm presenting objective reality; I also don't want to delude people into thinking that my subject is talking directly to them.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for.

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

Perception is a tool that's pointed on both ends.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

Our personal dispositions are as windowpanes through which we see the world either as rosy or dull. The way we color the glasses we wear is the way the world seems to us.

We only see what we want to see, and hear what we want to hear

"Don't believe me, don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else." Don't believe me, because what I say is only truth for me. Don't believe yourself, because most of the time what you tell yourself is only truth for you - especially when you tell yourself that you're not good enough, you're not intelligent enough, you're not beautiful enough - when you reject yourself before anybody else can reject you. And don't believe anybody else, because what they say is only truth for them.