Top 50 Herbert Read Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Herbert Read

2. “Love works miracles in stillness.”

— Herbert Read

3. “Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.”

— Herbert Read

4. “The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.”

— Herbert Read

5. “The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.”

— Herbert Read

6. “Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.”

— Herbert Read

7. “I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.”

— Herbert Read

8. “Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.”

— Herbert Read

9. “Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation’s currency.”

— Herbert Read

10. “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.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

12. “Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.”

— Herbert Read

13. “I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration.”

— Herbert Read

14. “Art is pattern informed by sensibility.”

— Herbert Read

15. “The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.”

— Herbert Read

16. “Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

19. “The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.”

— Herbert Read

20. “Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.”

— Herbert Read

21. “Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience – by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.”

— Herbert Read

22. “The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals – its philosophers, its poets and its artists.”

— Herbert Read

23. “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.”

— Herbert Read

24. “Spontaneity is not enough – or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.”

— Herbert Read

25. “Man is everywhere still in chains.”

— Herbert Read

26. “If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

28. “Works of art must persist as objects of contemplation.”

— Herbert Read

29. “Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.”

— Herbert Read

30. “If we persist in our restless desire to know everything about the universe and ourselves, then we must not be afraid of what the artist brings back from his voyage of discovery.”

— Herbert Read

31. “The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.”

— Herbert Read

32. “It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.”

— Herbert Read

33. “To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values – above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.”

— Herbert Read

34. “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.”

— Herbert Read

35. “Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.”

— Herbert Read

36. “The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.”

— Herbert Read

37. “The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.”

— Herbert Read

38. “Revolt, it will be said, implies violence; but this is an outmoded, an incompetent conception of revolt. The most effective form of revolt in this violent world we live in is non-violence.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

40. “The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

42. “The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.”

— Herbert Read

43. “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.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

45. “I know of no better name than Anarchism.”

— Herbert Read

46. “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.”

— Herbert Read

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

— Herbert Read

48. “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.”

— Herbert Read

49. “I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.”

— Herbert Read

50. “The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish...”

— Herbert Read