Herbert Read Quotes

72 Sourced Quotes

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.

Herbert Read
I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.

Herbert Read
It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.

Herbert Read
That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

Herbert Read
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.

Herbert Read
It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Herbert Read
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.

Herbert Read
The politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desires wealth or an unequal share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests. For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical.

Herbert Read
Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science… But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art.

Herbert Read
Saint-Exupéry is perhaps the writer who has most clearly (certainly most accessibly) expressed a philosophy of moral realism, which perhaps accounts for his enormous influence on the post-war generation in France (and his failure to make a like impression on the flabby moral tissue of the post-war generation in Great Britain and the United States).

Herbert Read
If we persist in our restless desire to know everything about the universe and ourselves, then we must not be afraid of what the artist brings back from his voyage of discovery.

Herbert Read
Beauty had been born, not, as we so often conceive it nowadays, as an ideal of humanity, but as measure, as the reduction of the chaos of appearances to the precision of linear symbols. Symmetry, balance, harmonic division, mated and mensurated intervals — such were its abstract characteristics.

Herbert Read
Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.

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

Herbert Read
There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.

Herbert Read
Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim - the ideal good; art has quite another aim - the objective truth... art never changes.

Herbert Read
But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

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

Herbert Read
Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence.

Herbert Read
A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.

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

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

Herbert Read
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.

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

Herbert Read
I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.

Herbert Read
Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

Herbert Read
It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.

Herbert Read
The school of art which Hulme started and Pound established.. diction, rhythm and metre were fully emancipated from formal artifice and the poet was free to act creatively under the laws of his own origination.

Herbert Read
The difference between poetry and prose is not one of surface qualities, or form, or mode of expression, but of essence. The state of mind in which poetry originates must either seek poetic expression or it must not be expressed.

Herbert Read
All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.

Herbert Read