Skip to content

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

— Eli Siegel Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

Another quote →

Topics

Beauty

More quotes by Eli Siegel

Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.

Every person in order to respect himself has to see the world as beautiful or good or acceptable.

Self and World (1957)

Children are really desperate to see the world as pleasing; and their desperateness is part of a wise hope.

Self and World (1957)

There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.

Self and World (1957)

Aesthetics is related to every particular conflict; to everyday conflict.

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

All Eli Siegel quotes →

You may also like

Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

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)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

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