Herbert Read Quotes - Page 3

Man is everywhere still in chains.

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.

The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.

The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity.

Spontaneity is not enough - or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.

My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.

The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.

I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.

The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.

This is the essential distinction--even opposition--between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, thefilm objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer--in actual practice it is rated very low--we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.