Herbert Read

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

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

The slave may be happy, but happiness is not enough.

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.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence.

It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.

Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.

If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical.

My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.

I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.