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What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form.

— Herbert Read The Origins of Art (1966)

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Art

More quotes by Herbert Read

All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Foreword (1956)

These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

Collected Poems (1966)

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

Collected Poems (1966)

Restraint is not the contrary of revolt.

Foreword (1956)

True poetry is never speech but always a song.

All Herbert Read quotes →

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Herbert Read (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.