Top Eli Siegel Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Eli Siegel Biography

Eli Siegel (August 16, 1902 – November 8, 1978) was the poet, critic, and educator who founded Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy that sees reality as the aesthetic oneness of opposites. An idea central to this philosophy—that every person, place or thing in reality has something in common with all other things—was expressed in his award-winning poem, "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana."

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Eli Siegel Quotes

Is 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?

Art, Manyness, Oneness, Reality, Simultaneous, Variety

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.

Admit, Fun, Manipulating, People, Self

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

Beauty, Making, Opposites

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.

Action, Arising, Individuality, Outward, Repose, Self

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.

Clumsy, Cutting, Imagist, Knives, Mean, Neatly

In reality opposites are one; art shows this.

Art, Opposites, Reality, Shows

The universe is Why, How, and What, in any order, and all at once.

Order, Universe

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.

Common, Cutting, Order, Superfluous, Thing, Understanding

Every work of art is about everything.

Art, Art Is, Everything, Fairness, Work

Reality is all that which can affect one.

Affect, Reality

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?

Calm, Given, Intense, Long, Oneness, Opposites

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.

Affected, Hoping, Importance, Important, Important Things, Things

There is not one thing that music does which does not say something about how a person should organize himself, too.

Doe, Music, Musical, Organize, Person, Should

Originality in art puts charm where it wasn't.

Art, Charm, Fairness, Originality

If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.

Gambling, Mistake, Stepping, Stone, Stones

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.

Care, Feelings, Giving, Liking, Quality, Wrong

To see the outside world as the same stuff as our most secret or unknown thoughts is a fine necessity.

Fine, Same, Secret, Stuff, Unknown, World

The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.

Art, Making, Opposites, Self

The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.

Emotion, Photography, Purpose, World