Herbert Edward Read citáty

strana 2

„Podle mého mínění by každý malíř měl svobodně malovat to, co se mu líbí: nelíbí-li se jeho malování veřejnosti, nemusí se veřejnost obtěžovat díváním se na ně.“

„Umění je únik z chaosu.“

„Revoluce se objevuje s každou generací.“

„Umění je činnost smyslů, činnost živelná jako primární emoce lásky, hněvu nebo strachu.“

„Umění nemusí být nutně totožné z krásou; nelze to však říkat příliš často, nebo příliš necitlivě.“

„Umění je lidské, ne božské; světské, ne svaté.“

„Umění se obrodí tehdy, až život sám bude obrozen.“

„Elita akumuluje moc, bohatství a volný čas.“

„Umělec musí malovat to, co nachází, nesmí chtít namalovat něco, co nenašel.“

„Stát bývá často popisován jako stroj: jeho celkové působení je nelidské.“

„Krása má svůj počátek v inteligenci.“

„Pan Joyce je veleknězem moderní literatury právě proto, že literatura je kněžství a má svatyně nedostupnější než tibetské kláštery.“

“The modern poet is above all things honest. He does not write for fame nor for money. He merely writes to vent his own spleen, his own bitterness. His own sense of disparity between the ugliness of the world that is and the beauty of the world that might be.”

“A poem is not a statement, but a manifestation, a manifestation of being”

“Shakespeare shows us tradition is a meaningless abstraction for the poet itself and I give thanks for for this poet reaching after nothing more distant than the impassioned accents of its own voice as it issued from an intuitive mind.”

“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.”

“War, as Rousseau pointed out long before Tolstoy took up the theme, only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes (Emile, Bk. IV). For this reason our main energies must be directed against the moral causes of war. Those moral causes lie within ourselves — and pacifists should not suppose for a moment that they are pure in heart in this respect.”

“Poetry, we might say, is concerned with the truth of what is, not with what is truth.”

“The Thousand and One Nights, with its magnificent apparatus of genii and afrits, is the greatest work of fantasy that has ever been evolved by tradition, and given literary form. But it, alas, is not English, and has no English equivalent. The Western world does not seem to have conceived the necessity of fairy-tales for grown-ups — though it has been suggested that the modern detective story is an equivalent — and that is perhaps why it condemns them to a life of unremitted toil.”

“The revolutionary artist is born into a world of clichés, of stale images and signs which no longer pierce the consciousness to express reality. He therefore invents new symbols, perhaps a whole new symbolic system.”

“The modern world has largely forgotten, and our educational systems ignore, the primary importance, in the evolution of man, of various types of symbolic communication—the communication embodied in gesture, ritual, dance, music myth, and poetic metaphor. All these modes of expression constitute a language of feeling, a non-discursive form of thought, absolutely essential to our individual development and to the unity of social life.”

“For the first time the personality is deliberately cultivated as such; and from that time [the European Renaissance] until today it has not been possible to separate the achievements of a civilization from the achievements of the individuals composing it. I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind. The future unit is the individual, a world in himself, self-contained and self-creative, freely giving and freely receiving, but essentially a free spirit.”

“Art is most simply and most usually defined as an attempt to create pleasing forms. Such forms satisfy our sense of beauty and the sense of beauty is satisfied when we are able to appreciate a unity or harmony of formal relations among our sense-perceptions.”