Quote

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.

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
Philosophy
Vision
Either
Spiritual
Art
Measure
Much
Economics
Believe
Significant
Men
Direct

More quotes by Herbert Read

Image
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
Image
Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.
Herbert Read
Image
Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
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
Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
Image
I know of no better name than Anarchism.
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
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
The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.
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
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 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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.
Herbert Read
Image
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
Herbert Read
Image
Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.
Herbert Read
Image
Man is everywhere still in chains.
Herbert Read
Image
Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
Herbert Read
Image
The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
Herbert Read