Eli Siegel Quotes

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

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

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

There is a deep and "dialectic" duality facing every human being, which can be put this way: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself?

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

If the sameness and difference of America were to become musical, it would be poetry.

Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary.

Don't shake the hand of reality with one finger.

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

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).

No self can truly know itself and be ashamed.

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

If you like yourself for the wrong reason, you will dislike yourself for the right reason.

When truth is divided, errors multiply.

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.