Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Lewis Hyde

Quote by Lewis Hyde

“As those who must worry about the livelihood of artists are fond of saying, “You cannot play ‘The Minute Waltz’ in less than a minute.” Worse (or perhaps better) you cannot write “The Minute Waltz” in less than … what? A day, a week, a year?—however long it takes. There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”

Quote by Lewis Hyde

Book:The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
Create image

Work

The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Lewis Hyde
Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde is an American essayist and poet, known for his profound reflections on creativity, culture, and society. His work delves into the lives and work of artists, as well as the role of art in society. more

You May Also Like

“We do not see the grey working day, the cap and gown, the note-books, the feet burning from the pavements of picture galleries, but things ' that set the spirit free for a moment,' ' stirring of the senses/ ' strange dyes,' ' strange colours and curious odours,' ' work of the artist's hands,' ' passionate attitudes.' It is not the style of ecstasy such as can be seen in Jefferies' Story of My Heart, or Sterne's Journal to Eliza, or Keats' last letter to Fanny Brawne. Hardly does it appear to be the style of remembered ecstasy as in Traherne's Centuries of Meditation or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. It is free from traces of experience. All is subtilised, intellectualised, ' casting off all debris.' It is a polished cabinet of collections from history, nature, and art ; objects detached from their settings but almost never without being integrated afresh by Pater's careful arrangement, whether they are pictures, books, landscapes or personalities. It fulfils Pater's own condition of art by putting its own ' happy world ' in place of ' the meaner world of our common days.”

ArtPoetryProseEcstasy
Book:Walter Pater
Create image

“Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he [Flaubert] gave himself to superhuman labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. In this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique word.... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one—one form, one mode—to express what I want to say.”

ArtStylePerfectionFlaubert
Book:Appreciations, With an Essay on Style
Create image

“As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm—the form in all its characteristics. If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal.”

ArtStyleWholeness
Book:Appreciations, With an Essay on Style
Create image

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.”

GodPastReligionHistoryIntoleranceFanaticismMagaDictatorsMake America Great AgainFacism
Book:Parable of the Talents
Create image

“India is a highly civilized nation - a nation which developed a rich culture much earlier than any nation of Europe, and has never lost it. India was the first and only nation that proved too powerful for Alexander the Great. It was India that stopped his advance and compelled him to turn back in his career of world conquest. India gave to the world two out of six of its greatest Historic religions. Of the six greatest Epic Poems of the world India produced two. India gave to mankind - Kalidasa. India contributed enormously to the origin and advancement of Civilization by giving to the world its immensely important decimal system, which is the foundation of modern mathematics and much modern science. India early created the beginning of nearly all of the sciences, some of which she carried forward to remarkable degrees of development, thus leading the world. India has produced great literature, great arts, great philosophical systems, great religions, and great men in every department of life - rulers, statesmen, financiers, scholars, poets, generals, colonizers, ship-builders, skilled artisans and craftsmen of every kind, agriculturists, industrial organizers and leaders in far-reaching trade and commerce by land and sea. For 2,500 years India was pre-eminently the intellectual and spiritual teacher of Asia, which means of half the human race.”

ArtReligionsAlexander The GreatGreatness Of IndiaPhilosophical Wisdom
Author:Jabez Thomas Sunderland
Create image