Eli Siegel Quotes

The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker ... Labor is the only source of wealth.

In order to be deep, we sometimes have to cut through and cut apart. That is to be seen in the common phrase, 'Cut it out!' The reason is that this thing is seen as superfluous and therefore it should be excised, as a growth, unnecessary, should be excised.

Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary.

Music for a long time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by ... [If] the world is the oneness of opposites - and music says it is - the world is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at once?

We want people to represent us in politics - and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different from the person concerned with it - or considering it - aesthetics is there.

Is there in painting an effect which arises from the being together of repose and energy in the artist's mind? - can both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail and composition? - and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?

You don't want to see things as they are because your ego would have to admit that things outside yourself are necessary for the self to be. You still have fun, as most people do, from manipulating things.

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.

To see the outside world as the same stuff as our most secret or unknown thoughts is a fine necessity ...

Is there in every work of art something which shows reality as one and also something which shows reality as many and diverse? - must every work of art have a simultaneous presence of oneness and manyness, unity and variety?

True individuality is the repose arising from the relation of a self to all it has to do with. Bad individuality has in it a separation between outward action and a flat repose inwardly.

Reality is all that which can affect one.

Concealment is equated, unknowingly to ourselves, with individuality; the more we conceal the more it seems we are asserting our very personality, resisting a somewhat repellent, unwelcome intrusion of other things into ourselves.

Every work of art is about everything.

There is not one thing that music does which does not say something about how a person should organize himself, too.

The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites,