Best quotes by Eli Siegel
Eli Siegel
Poet, critic, and educator
Eli Siegel (August 16, 1902 – November 8, 1978) was a poet, critic, and educator. He founded Aesthetic Realism, a philosophical movement based in New York City. An idea central to Aesthetic Realism—that every person, place or thing in reality has something in common with all other things—was expressed in the title poem of his first volume, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. His second volume was Hail, American Development.
Siegel's philosophic works include Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World, and The Aesthetic Nature of the World. His teaching of Aesthetic Realism spanned almost four decades and included thousands of extemporaneous lectures on poetry, the arts and sciences, religion, economics, and national ethics, as well as lessons to individuals and general classes which showed that questions of everyday life are aesthetic and ethical.
His lecture on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which Williams attended, is published in The Williams-Siegel Documentary and his lectures on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw were edited into a critical consideration titled James and the Children. Siegel's philosophy, and his statement, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites", has influenced artists, scientists, and educators.
Eli Siegel quotes by category:
ArtEvery work of art is about everything.
ArtOriginality in art puts charm where it wasn't.
ArtIn reality opposites are one; art shows this.
ArtIs 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?
BeautyAll beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.
Art can make the old surprising, and the new and sudden soothing.
Reality is all that which can affect one.
Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary.
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.
We should see the desire for neatness, the desire for sharp impressions, as a desire in art.
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.
The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.
Concealment is equated, unknowingly to ourselves, with individuality; the more we conceal the more it seems we are asserting our very personality, resisting a somewhat repellent, unwelcome intrusion of other things into ourselves.
There is not one thing that music does which does not say something about how a person should organize himself, too.
The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.
To see the outside world as the same stuff as our most secret or unknown thoughts is a fine necessity.
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.
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?
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.
The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.
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.
When truth is divided, errors multiply.
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?
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.
The universe is Why, How, and What, in any order, and all at once.
The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker... Labor is the only source of wealth.
If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.