Herbert Read quotes - page 4

English Poetry has come full circle from the widest public appeal, the communal poetry of ballads to the narrowest possible, in the present day as the poet addresses himself. (Herbert Read)
Words,their sound and even their very appearance, are, of course,everything to the poet. View quote
Herbert Read
From the poet's viewpoint a lyric is a poem which embodies a single or simple emotional attitude that expresses directly an uninterrupted mood or inspiration. View quote
Herbert Read
The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact. View quote
Herbert Read
Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children. View quote
Herbert Read
In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted. View quote
Herbert Read
The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish. View quote
Herbert Read
Love works miracles in stillness. View quote
Herbert Read
Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs. View quote
Herbert Read
Spontaneity is not enough - or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision. View quote
Herbert Read
We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. (Herbert Read)
Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual. View quote
Herbert Read
Restraint is not the contrary of revolt. View quote
Herbert Read
What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. View quote
Herbert Read
All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State. View quote
Herbert Read
To stop the war, besides being a futile gesture, would leave the crisis unresolved. It would postpone the necessity of a solution. Therefore, in a spirit of fatalism (which my opponents are welcome to call a spirit of sadism) I say: Let the war go on. It is the shortest and therefore the best way to replace the capitalist system by a democratic system, and which will at the same time rescind those partial and tyrannical solutions of the crisis represented by the Soviet Union no less than by Germany and Italy. View quote
Herbert Read
What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. Form, which we discover in nature by analysis, is obstinately mathematical in its manifestations-which is to say that creation in art requires thought and deliberation. But this is not to say that form can be reduced to a formula. In every work of art it must be re-created, but that too is true of every work of nature. Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed. View quote
Herbert Read
Kierkegaard was concerned to prove what might be called the activist nature of love, and in this respect he returns to the conception of the early Greek philosophers. He goes so far as to say that the poet who sings of earthly love cannot be a Christian, 'for love of one's neighbour is not sung, it is acted'. View quote
Herbert Read