Eli Siegel Quotes

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

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

A pessimist is a person who finds an oyster in a pearl.

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?

No self can truly know itself and be ashamed.

Art is internal and external. The repose a person feels in aesthetic creation comes from his, for the time, feeling he is what he is and also what he is not. Ego and otherness don't fight for the while. The artist feels he has reached form in the deepest places of his personality, because things outside himself have been see courageously, truly, respectfully by him.

The quiet of this afternoon is strange, haunting, awful;
Hear that buzzing in the hot grass, coming from live things; and those crows' cries from somewhere;
There is a sluggish, sad brook near here, too.
The bird is gone now, so graceful, fair as it was, And the sky has nothing but the brightness of air in it.
The clean color of air.
The sun makes it be afternoon here;...

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

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

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

There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.

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).

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

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.

The artist created; the owner possessed.