Eli Siegel Quotes

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

A friend is a person who takes care of himself by being friendly to you.

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.

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

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

ONE QUESTION I - Why?

The artist created; the owner possessed.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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