Eli Siegel Quotes

#1. The universe is Why, How, and What, in any order, and all at once.

Eli Siegel

#2. 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.

Eli Siegel

#3. 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.

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel

#5. When truth is divided, errors multiply.

Eli Siegel

#6. Originality in art puts charm where it wasn't.

Eli Siegel

#7. If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.

Eli Siegel

#8. 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.

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel

#11. In reality opposites are one; art shows this.

Eli Siegel

#12. 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.

Eli Siegel

#13. 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?

Eli Siegel

#14. There is a quality of murky grandeur we give ourselves in having our own feelings, recoiling, separate from other things ... To feel that we can care for ourselves without seeing our feelings as objects, and liking them as objects, is to be wrong about our care for ourselves.

Eli Siegel

#15. 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.

Eli Siegel

#16. Reality is all that which can affect one.

Eli Siegel

#17. We should see the desire for neatness, the desire for sharp impressions, as a desire in art.

Eli Siegel

#18. Art can make the old surprising, and the new and sudden soothing.

Eli Siegel

#19. The most important thing for you to do is see that in hoping to be affected by other things as fully as possible, you become more yourself.

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel

#21. Every work of art is about everything.

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel

#24. The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.

Eli Siegel

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

Eli Siegel