Top 15 Eli Siegel Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In reality opposites are one; art shows this.

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.

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

The artist created; the owner possessed.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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