Eli Siegel Quotes

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

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

No self can truly know itself and be ashamed.

When truth is divided, errors multiply.

To ourselves we are always being introduced.

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

An unsure person, when truth makes a point, is too often stabbed, not inspired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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