Lewis Hyde Quotes

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

Lewis Hyde

#2. An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

Lewis Hyde

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The

Lewis Hyde

#7. 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

#8. We are each born into a situation - a particular body (its race, sex, health ... ), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation - and born into the stories told of each of these.

Lewis Hyde

#9. The gift finds the man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own.

Lewis Hyde

#10. I think of a myth as a story that helps you explain all the different pieces of your life. In that broad sense, there is no way to live without mythology.

Lewis Hyde

#11. Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things.

Lewis Hyde

#12. We forgive when we give up attachment to our wounds.

Lewis Hyde

#13. 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

#14. We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.

Lewis Hyde

#15. 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

#16. Nothing is more dangerous to liberty than the power of entailed art and ideas. The very soul of a republic is the common citizen's inalienable access to knowledge.

Lewis Hyde

#17. I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Lewis Hyde

#18. 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

#19. Creativity in science is almost always cumulative and collaborative; it proceeds collectively and thus thrives when barriers to collectivity are reduced.

Lewis Hyde

#20. That all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods.

Lewis Hyde

#21. Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

Lewis Hyde

#22. 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