Herbert Read Quotes

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

… the biography of mankind

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.

Man is born a barbarian, and only raises himself above the beast by culture.

I don't know a single person in life that doesn't have conflict. I don't really enjoy acting enough to not want to experience something that feels like it really affects things. It's like, if you were a surfer, would you want to surf where there was like two-foot waves, or would you want to surf on like ten-foot waves. To me, the more kind of dramatic stories are more exciting for me, to play with.

I used to sing like Nat King Cole. I mean he was the guy when I was comin' up, and you know, man, people used to say of me, "Damn, he sure do sound like Nat King Cole." But there was a day, and luckily for me it was early, when I woke up and asked myself, "Well, when are the ask me to sing because I sound like me?" So my advice is, never do anything that you don't like.

There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.

While the work or play is on, it is a lot of fun if while you are doing one you don't constantly feel that you ought to be doing the other.

An American religion: Work, play, breathe, bathe, study, live, laugh, and love.

The opposite of play is not work. It's depression.

I think directing is part play, part work, not just all work, because I think you always have to play. I think that's ultimately why I got into making movies, is because I love to play.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.

I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

It may be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.

The truth is few people “think” big and even fewer “play” big. Why? Because “big” often means big responsibilitie s, big hassles and big problems. They look at that “bigness” and shrink. They’re smaller than their problems. They back away from challenges. Ironically, they back themselves into the biggest problem of all ... being broke, or close to it.

The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living.

Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

I love anything that gets me outside of my own head. I love music because it's really just - I tried to play piano as a kid. I was awful. It didn't help, and this is absolutely true, that my piano teacher had arthritis. And that's not a good way to learn.

Culture and education have no bounds or limits; now man is in a phase in which he must decide for himself how far he can proceed in the culture that belongs to the whole of humanity.

When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has out-grown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity.