“The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap.”
Introduction
The Culture of Cities (1938)
Context: The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
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Lewis Mumford 75
American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology,… 1895–1990Related quotes
“Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!”
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
"Les Sept Vieillards" [The Seven Old Men] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_sept_vieillards
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
“[Footnote:] An Ant on a hot stove-lid runs faster than an Ant on a cold one. Who wouldn't?”
The Ant, from Insects for Everybody
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)
Gale Hawthorne and Katniss Everdeen (pp. 63-64)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. IX: Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted (1913)
Context: The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
“A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.”
Amas d'épithètes, mauvaises louanges: ce sont les faits qui louent, et la manière de les raconter.
Aphorism 13
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit
Aphorism 42
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.
A Common Inference.
In this Our World : Poems (1898)
Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)