“There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.”
Source: The Great Book of Amber
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Roger Zelazny 112
American speculative fiction writer 1937–1995Related quotes
From his Facebook profile https://www.facebook.com/adammyerson (retrieved August 1, 2018).
“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.”
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "Suppose my child ask me what the fairytale means, what am I to say?"
If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so? If you do see a meaning in it, there it is for you to give him. A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much.
“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.”
“Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.”
Book II, Chapter 1, p. 149
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
statement in Hans Hofmann: Recent Paintings (1952) Kootz Gallery
1950s
“Cities are the crucible of civilization.”
2010s
Source: Austin Brown. " Geoffrey B. West, 'Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster' http://blog.longnow.org/02011/07/26/geoffrey-b-west-%E2%80%9Cwhy-cities-keep-on-growing-corporations-always-die-and-life-gets-faster%E2%80%9D/." at blog.longnow.org, July 26th, 2011.
“The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.”