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Herbert Read Quotes
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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
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I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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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
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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
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What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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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
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Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence.
Herbert Read
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A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.
Herbert Read
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If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
Herbert Read
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The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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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
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Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
Herbert Read
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It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
Herbert Read
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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.
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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.
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All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.
Herbert Read
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Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Herbert Read
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Born:
December 4, 1893
Died:
June 12, 1968
(aged 74)
Bio:
Sir Herbert Edward Read was an English anarchist, poet and literary critic, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Known for:
The Green Child (1935)
The meaning of art (1931)
A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959)
Art and Society (1937)
Most used words:
poet
poetry
poem
feeling
form
society
beauty
art
modern
vision
rhythm
man
expression
war
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