Herbert Read - Beauty Quotes

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There is no beauty in anything rational. Beauty emerges from the unknown, often from the inane, generally irrational, as unforseen combinations.

Herbert Read

The modern poet is above all things honest. He does not write for fame nor for money. He merely writes to vent his own spleen, his own bitterness. His own sense of disparity between the ugliness of the world that is and the beauty of the world that might be.

Herbert Read

The rhythm of a poem ceases the moment the feeling loses its intensity.
The feeling (of intensity) held in a crystal cage, asn an image, sealed and immortalized for our contemplation. Beauty in a wild foray, the form we have created, now, remote from the emotion we experience.

Herbert Read

The work of art … is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.

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