Lewis Hyde Quotes

18 quotes in 469 categories

• We are each born into a situation-a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation-and born into the stories…
• An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received;…
• The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies.…
• All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck.…
• For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life…
• Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a…
• What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from .…
• True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers.
• Uncovering secrets is apocalyptic in the simple sense (the Greek root means ‘an uncovering’). In this case, it lifts the shame covers. It allows articulation…
• The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns towards him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if…
• Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through…
• We forgive when we give up attachment to our wounds.
• Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most…
• Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often…
• An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.
• But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out…
• Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
• Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all…

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