Eli Siegel famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.
-- Eli Siegel

#Mistake #Making Mistakes #Stones
Music for a long time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by.... [If] the world is the oneness of opposites - and music says it is - the world is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at once?
-- Eli Siegel

#Opposites #Oneness #Long
The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.
-- Eli Siegel

#Photography #Purpose #World
The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker... Labor is the only source of wealth.
-- Eli Siegel

#Important #Doe #Wealth
The most important thing for you to do is see that in hoping to be affected by other things as fully as possible, you become more yourself.
-- Eli Siegel

#Important #Importance
True individuality is the repose arising from the relation of a self to all it has to do with. Bad individuality has in it a separation between outward action and a flat repose inwardly.
-- Eli Siegel

#Self #Individuality #Action
One of the things called forth by the Imagist movement in poetry was neatness; and when we say keenness, we mean neatness. A knife that is keen is also a knife that cuts neatly; it isn't brutal. Sharpness is different from brutality. Brutality is clumsy: it is wide - it has a lot of fist and thumb and no delicate finger.
-- Eli Siegel

#Mean #Cutting #Knives
Is there in painting an effect which arises from the being together of repose and energy in the artist's mind? - can both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail and composition? - and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?
-- Eli Siegel

#Artist #Color #Serenity
Is there in every work of art something which shows reality as one and also something which shows reality as many and diverse? - must every work of art have a simultaneous presence of oneness and manyness, unity and variety?
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Reality #Oneness
Reality is all that which can affect one.
-- Eli Siegel

#Reality
In order to be deep, we sometimes have to cut through and cut apart. That is to be seen in the common phrase, 'Cut it out!' The reason is that this thing is seen as superfluous and therefore it should be excised, as a growth, unnecessary, should be excised.
-- Eli Siegel

#Cutting #Order #Understanding
The universe is Why, How, and What, in any order, and all at once.
-- Eli Siegel

#Order #Universe
To see the outside world as the same stuff as our most secret or unknown thoughts is a fine necessity...
-- Eli Siegel

#Secret #World #Stuff
There is a quality of murky grandeur we give ourselves in having our own feelings, recoiling, separate from other things... To feel that we can care for ourselves without seeing our feelings as objects, and liking them as objects, is to be wrong about our care for ourselves.
-- Eli Siegel

#Giving #Feelings #Quality
You don't want to see things as they are because your ego would have to admit that things outside yourself are necessary for the self to be. You still have fun, as most people do, from manipulating things.
-- Eli Siegel

#Fun #Self #People
We should see the desire for neatness, the desire for sharp impressions, as a desire in art.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Desire #Should
There is not one thing that music does which does not say something about how a person should organize himself, too.
-- Eli Siegel

#Musical #Doe #Should
The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites,
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Self #Opposites
All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.
-- Eli Siegel

#Opposites
The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Self #Opposites
In reality opposites are one; art shows this.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Reality #Opposites
Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Way #Fairness
Every work of art is about everything.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Fairness #Art Is
Originality in art puts charm where it wasn't.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Originality #Fairness
Art can make the old surprising, and the new and sudden soothing.
-- Eli Siegel

#Art #Fairness #Soothing
When truth is divided, errors multiply.
-- Eli Siegel

#Honesty #Errors #Truth Is

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