Herbert Read Men Quotations

A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.

You might think that it would he the natural desire of every man to develop as an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true.

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings. ... The value of words help to define the feeling itself. ... The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

In a sense, every tool is a machine--the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is between one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art.

It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.

Man is everywhere still in chains.