Top 83 Herbert Read Quotes
#1. The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.
#2. The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.
#3. Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
#4. We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.
#5. The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish ...
#6. Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.
#7. I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.
#8. The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
#9. 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.
#10. 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.
#11. The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.
#12. The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
#13. Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
#14. These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.
#15. But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.
#16. Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
#17. Love works miracles in stillness.
#18. The dice cannot read their own spots.
#19. 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.
#20. Revolt, it will be said, implies violence; but this is an outmoded, an incompetent conception of revolt. The most effective form of revolt in this violent world we live in is non-violence.
#21. Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.
#22. The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.
#23. If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.
#24. It may be that it is only by the grace of granitization that we have continents to live on.
#25. Do you know about the horrors during the Time of Titans? Or the Hrethgir Rebellions?" "I've read my father's memoirs in great detail - " "I don't mean Agamemnon's propaganda. Have you learned the real history?
#26. 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.
#27. The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.
#28. The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.
#29. Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency.
#30. 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
#31. The whole inspiration of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the prophets. To read the Bible for these fundamentals is a necessity of American life.
#32. A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.
#33. If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
#34. Man is everywhere still in chains.
#35. The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.
#36. Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
#37. As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'
#38. I suggest that the best geologist is he who has seen most rocks.
#39. The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.
#40. Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
#41. 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.
#42. In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.
#43. I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.
#44. The hearts letter is read in the eyes.
#45. I don't listen to a huge amount of music generally. Partly because you've sat in a studio for 10 hours and then when you come home you just want to read a book, and listen to the sound of your central heating system.
#46. I know of no better name than Anarchism.
#47. 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.
#48. The work of art ... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.
#49. I've always loved comic books. As a kid, I used to read cowboy stories and historical comics about other worlds, unknown places that would take me out of myself and which helped to develop my imagination.
#50. If we persist in our restless desire to know everything about the universe and ourselves, then we must not be afraid of what the artist brings back from his voyage of discovery.
#51. You might think that it would he the natural desire of every man to develop as an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true.
#52. And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!
#53. Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.
#54. What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
#55. 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.
#56. The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech ... For true poetry is never speech but always a song.
#57. The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
#58. 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.
#59. ... one doesn't need telepathy to read your intentions.
#60. Spontaneity is not enough - or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.
#61. In general, modern art ... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.
#62. 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.
#63. 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.
#64. Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.
#65. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanisms of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence, magic is a necessity of every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society.
#66. I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree; For sure then I should grow To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust Her household to me, and I should be just.
#67. 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.
#68. Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
#69. Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.
#70. Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.
#71. Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.
#72. I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.
#73. The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.
#74. The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.
#75. Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.
#76. 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.
#77. Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.
#78. 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.
#79. Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
#80. 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.
#81. I love mysteries, and I read them every night before I go to bed.
#82. 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.
#83. It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
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