Herbert Read Quotes

66 quotes in 965 categories

• If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.
• 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…
• A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.
• I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis…
• Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
• The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.
• The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.
• 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…
• Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
• The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.
• 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…
• I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.
• I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.
• If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.
• Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.
• The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.
• What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.
• To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and…
• 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…
• 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…

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