Lewis Hyde famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns towards him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Moving #Circles #Generosity
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Voice #Cages #Use
What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from . . . pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. . . works of art exist simultaneously in two â€œeconomiesâ€, a market economy and a gift economy.Â Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Art #Two #Essentials
The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Looks #Faces #Mystery
We are each born into a situation-a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation-and born into the stories told of each of these.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Sex #Race #Community
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Civilization #People #Creative
When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Art #Grateful #Artist
Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Art #Self #Political
We forgive when we give up attachment to our wounds.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Giving Up #Attachment #Forgiving
An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation
-- Lewis Hyde

#Artist #Essentials #Creation
Uncovering secrets is apocalyptic in the simple sense (the Greek root means â€˜an uncoveringâ€™). In this case, it lifts the shame covers. It allows articulation to enter where silence once ruled.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Mean #Simple #Roots
True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Government #Citizens #Makers
Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Party #Giving #Groups
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Artist #Library #World
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Creativity #Artist #Thinking
An essential portion of any artistâ€™s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that â€˜begging bowlâ€™ to which the gift is drawn.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Artist #Creating #Essentials
Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Hands #Littles #Way
An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Killers #Poet
Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, at last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Weed #Men #Garden
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
-- Lewis Hyde

#Art #Memories #Inspiration

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