Eli Siegel Quotes

Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else--to everything else, as different.

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

Wrongfully to be contemptuous of other human beings is inviting mental unhealth for oneself.

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

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

The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his. All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs.

Aesthetics is the one fundamental means a person has of liking himself.

Shadows...bring softness to every thing. An object and its shadow are softness and hardness.

ONE QUESTION I - Why?

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

Every fact has music in it. The poet looks for it.

A person is separate from all other things and together with all other things. To understand opposites in a self, the meaning of together and separate must be seen (this meaning is like that of same and different).

When truth is divided, errors multiply.

To ourselves we are always being introduced.

If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.