Herbert Read

"The words in a poem, are vocal signs that convey an intangible essence that vanishes the moment we approach it with an analytical intelligence."

"War, as Rousseau pointed out long before Tolstoy took up the theme, only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes . For this reason our main energies must be directed against the moral…"

"All art originates in an act of intuition or vision."

"I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed …"

"Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence."

"The revolutionary artist is born into a world of clichés, of stale images and signs which no longer pierce the consciousness to express reality. He therefore invents new symbols, perhaps a whole new s…"

"These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity."

"The aesthetic canons of Puritanism or Iconoclasm have little relevance to the facts of art, in so far as these facts are an expression of the diversity of human creatures. Like Fascism today, those re…"