Lewis Hyde Quotes

#1. There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

Sharon Olds

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Lewis Hyde

#5. 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

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

Lewis Hyde

#7. I grew up loving music, like, loving it. I was involved in church choir, leading worship and all the choirs in my school - even glee club.

Kelsea Ballerini

#8. No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to.

CrimethInc.

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in
solitude, as gay as in company.

Charlotte Bronte

#12. 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

#13. Death changes nothing but the mask that covers our faces.

Khalil Gibran

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

Lewis Hyde

#15. 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

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

Lewis Hyde

#17. 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

#18. There are no accidents in Nature,

John Muir

#19. When somethin's not right it's wrong.

Bob Dylan

#20. 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

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

Lewis Hyde

#22. We can't, little cricket. It is against the law to fly this flag - even to put up a picture of it. Korea is part of the Japanese Empire now. But someday this will be our own country once more. Your own country.

Linda Sue Park

#23. If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

Timur Bekmambetov

#24. An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

Lewis Hyde

#25. 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

#26. How happy he whose toil Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams. His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve In soft repose; on him the balmy dews Of Sleep with double nutriment descend.

John Armstrong

#27. I am grateful that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country.

Cornelia Fort

#28. 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

#29. I never thought anything was strange in Puerto Rico other than the big mosquitos; because I was born there, nothing was really foreign to me. I think what I saw strange coming to L.A. was that a lot of people are a little bit two-faced. In Puerto Rico, you don't get that.

Joyce Giraud

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

Lewis Hyde

#34. It's enough to want to make even sainted sailors resort to salty language.

Samuel J. Biondo

#35. The spirit of an artist's gifts can wake our own.

Lewis Hyde "The Gift"

#36. 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

#37. Taking an interest in what others are thinking and doing is often a much more powerful form of encouragement than praise.

Robert Martin