Herbert Read Short Quotes

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All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.

Herbert Read
A poem is not a statement, but a manifestation, a manifestation of being

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

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

Herbert Read
Poetry, we might say, is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.

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

Herbert Read
Words, their sound and even their very appearance, are, of course, everything to he poet.

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

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

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

Herbert Read
I saw him stab
And stab again
A well-killed Boche.
This is the happy warrior,
This is he…

Herbert Read
The distinction between a major and minor poet is the ability to write a long poem successfully.

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

Herbert Read
Lorca was killed, singing,
and Fox who was my friend.
The rhythm returns: the song
which has no end.

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

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

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

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
The process of poetry consists firstly in maintaining this vision in its integrity and secondly in expressing this vision in words.

Herbert Read
A short poem is often called a lyric, which originally meant a poem short enough to be set to music and sung for a moment's pleasure.

Herbert Read
These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

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
The poem, even when it has some predetermined pattern, must be wrought to some effect or finish that justifies the exclamation: This is a poem!

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

Herbert Read
Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

Herbert Read
It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event,

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