Lewis Hyde Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.

Lewis Hyde
Uncovering secrets is apocalyptic in the simple sense (the Greek root means 'an uncovering'). In this case, it lifts the shame covers. It allows articulation to enter where silence once ruled.

Lewis Hyde
Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.

Lewis Hyde
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.

Lewis Hyde
What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from... pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity... works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.

Lewis Hyde
True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers.

Lewis Hyde
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

Lewis Hyde
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.

Lewis Hyde
Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.

Lewis Hyde
An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn.

Lewis Hyde
When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.

Lewis Hyde
Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.

Lewis Hyde
We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.

Lewis Hyde
A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.

Lewis Hyde