Herbert Read Quotes

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

In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. 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.

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

Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.

Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.

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

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

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

What we need, we are told every day, is more and better leadership. But what this demand involves is a closer and closer approximation to fascism. The fascists alone have evolved an efficient form of leadership: efficient leadership is fascism.

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.

The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.

Sensibility ... is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses.

The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Magic is not, and never has been a substitute for science, but is rather a constructive activity with a specific social function, and one that is still operative. [ ... ] The aim of magical objects and magical rites is to arouse emotion in the group and to make such aroused emotions effective agents.

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

Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science... But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art.

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

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.

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.

It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.

In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.

Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.

The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts.He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling.

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

Spontaneity is not enough - or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.

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

I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.

Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.

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

An entertainment is something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life. It makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries; it interrupts our conscious thoughts and habits, rests our nerves and minds, though it may incidentally exhaust our bodies. Art, on the other hand, though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence.

The greatest intensification of the horrors of war is a direct result of the democratisation of the State. So long as the army was a professional unit, the specialist function of a limited number of men, war remained a relatively harmless contest for power. But once it became everyman's duty to defend his home (or his political "rights") warfare was free to range wherever that home might be, and to attack every form of life and property associated with that home.

Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity.

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.

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.

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.

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

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.

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.

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

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

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result isFantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.

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

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression ... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking ... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.

But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.

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.

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish ...