Herbert Read Quotes

“Magic is not, and never has been a substitute for science, but is rather a constructive activity with a specific social function, and one that is still operative. [ ... ] The aim of magical objects and magical rites is to arouse emotion in the group and to make such aroused emotions effective agents.”

— Herbert Read

“Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.”

— Herbert Read

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.

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.”

— Herbert Read

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

— Herbert Read

“Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.”

— Herbert Read

“The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.”

— Herbert Read

“Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.”

— Herbert Read

“What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.”

— Herbert Read

“Man is everywhere still in chains.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

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.

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.”

— Herbert Read

“The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.”

— Herbert Read

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

— Herbert Read

“Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

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.

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

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.

— Herbert Read

Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.

— Herbert Read

“The work of art ... is an instrument for tilling the human psyche, that it may continue to yield a harvest of vital beauty.”

— Herbert Read

“If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.”

— Herbert Read

The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.

— Herbert Read

“Sensibility ... is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses.”

— Herbert Read

“The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.”

— Herbert Read

“The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish ...”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— 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.”

— Herbert Read

“Sentir mon CÅ“ur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings ... The value of words help to define the feeling itself ... The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

In a sense, every tool is a machine
the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is between one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art.

— Herbert Read

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression ... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking ... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

— Herbert Read

“An enormous amount of art and literature is erotic in the sense that it stimulates vague sexual emotions, but it has no pornographic intention or effect because "it leaves everything to the imagination." The consumer has to invent his own images, and it is felt, I do not know with what justification, that there is no harm in this.”

— Herbert Read

“Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.”

— Herbert Read

“Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

“It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read

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.

— Herbert Read

“These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.”

— Herbert Read

“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.”

— Herbert Read