Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Herbert Read
Age: 74 †
Born: 1893
Born: November 4
Died: 1968
Died: June 12
Anarchist
Art Historian
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Muscoates
North Yorkshire
Sir Herbert Edward Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Read
Herbert Edward Read
Human
Measured
Humans
Intensity
Significance
Deeper
Progress
Apprehension
Existence
Wider
Literature
Richness
Experience
Scope

More quotes by Herbert Read

Image
Love works miracles in stillness.
Herbert Read
Image
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
Image
The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
Herbert Read
Image
In order to create it is necessary to destroy and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.
Herbert Read
Image
Man is everywhere still in chains.
Herbert Read
Image
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
Herbert Read
Image
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
Image
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.
Herbert Read
Image
The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury for the sculptor it is a necessity.
Herbert Read
Image
The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.
Herbert Read
Image
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.
Herbert Read
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.
Herbert Read
Image
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
Image
Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
Image
Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
Herbert Read
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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