Quotes from Herbert Read

Love works miracles in stillness.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

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

I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.

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

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.

A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.

I know of no better name than Anarchism.

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.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

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.

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.

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.

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

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

Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.

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

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

I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.

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

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.

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

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

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