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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

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

More quotes by Herbert Read

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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
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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
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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
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Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.
Herbert Read
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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
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Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called scienceĀ… But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
Herbert Read
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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
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The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
Herbert Read
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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
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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
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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
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In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.
Herbert Read
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Man is everywhere still in chains.
Herbert Read
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Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
Herbert Read