Eli Siegel Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

To ourselves we are always being introduced.

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 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.

According to Aesthetic Realism, the greatest sin that a person can have is the desire for contempt. Because as soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don't want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.

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

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

So we are alone in our blood and bones and our thoughts. It seems we are separate if we want to feel that way. And yet we can look out.

The artist created; the owner possessed.

All art puts separateness and togetherness together. All selves want to do this.

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