35 Quotes by Lewis Hyde

But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.

An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.

It is hard to travel in this fallen world if you lose the power of speech every time evil meets you on the path.

We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she as extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.

There is the family of our birth and then there is a more noble world to which we really belong; the richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.