93 Quotes by Herbert Read

Man is everywhere still in chains.

The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.

In History, stagnant waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life & vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.

It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.

Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.

Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression. ... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking. ... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts.He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling.