Eli Siegel Quotes

The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

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.

Art is a way of showing greater fairness to things than is customary.

All 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.

Originality in art puts charm where it wasn't.

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

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

When truth is divided, errors multiply.

Every work of art is about everything.

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?

In reality opposites are one; art shows this.

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

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