Explore Quotes by Herbert Read

Love works miracles in stillness.

That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.

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 gradually revert to the old one.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

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.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

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 difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

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 structural efficiency.

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

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.

The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.

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 whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.