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Eli Siegel Quotes

Eli Siegel was the poet, critic, and educator who founded Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy that states: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” An idea central to Aesthetic Realism—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".

Two highly acclaimed volumes of poetry were published during his lifetime, and in 1958 he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Siegel's philosophic works include Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism and Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World. His teaching of Aesthetic Realism spanned almost four decades and included thousands of extemporaneous lectures on poetry, the arts and sciences, religion, economics, and national ethics, as well as lessons to individuals and general classes which showed that questions of everyday life are aesthetic and ethical.

His lecture on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which Williams attended, is published in The Williams-Siegel Documentary and his lectures on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw were edited into a critical consideration titled James and the Children.

Siegel's philosophy, and his statement, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites", has influenced artists, scientists, and educators. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. August 1902 – 8. November 1978
Eli Siegel photo
Eli Siegel: 19 quotes2 likes

Famous Eli Siegel Quotes

“So we are alone in our blood and bones and our thoughts. It seems we are separate if we want to feel that way. And yet we can look out.”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“No self can truly know itself and be ashamed.”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“Every person in order to respect himself has to see the world as beautiful or good or acceptable.”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“Aesthetics is related to every particular conflict; to everyday conflict.”

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

“Aesthetics is the one fundamental means a person has of liking himself.”

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

“All art puts separateness and togetherness together. All selves want to do this.”

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

Eli Siegel Quotes about personality

“Art is internal and external. The repose a person feels in aesthetic creation comes from his, for the time, feeling he is what he is and also what he is not. Ego and otherness don't fight for the while. The artist feels he has reached form in the deepest places of his personality, because things outside himself have been see courageously, truly, respectfully by him.”

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

“Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else--to everything else, as different.”

Eli Siegel

Preface, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, 1957

“A person is separate from all other things and together with all other things. To understand opposites in a self, the meaning of together and separate must be seen (this meaning is like that of same and different).”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his. All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs.”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

Eli Siegel Quotes

“Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

Eli Siegel

Definition 18 (c) Definition Press, (New York: Definition Press, 1964)

“Don't shake the hand of reality with one finger.”

Eli Siegel

Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims, Definition Press 1964

“In reality opposites are one; art shows this.”

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

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

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

“Children are really desperate to see the world as pleasing; and their desperateness is part of a wise hope.”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“There is a deep and "dialectic" duality facing every human being, which can be put this way: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself?”

Eli Siegel

Self and World (1957)

“The quiet of this afternoon is strange, haunting, awful;
Hear that buzzing in the hot grass, coming from live things; and those crows' cries from somewhere;
There is a sluggish, sad brook near here, too.
The bird is gone now, so graceful, fair as it was,
And the sky has nothing but the brightness of air in it.
The clean color of air.
The sun makes it be afternoon here;…”

Eli Siegel

Extract from the title poem Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana [Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, Defintion Press, (1957)]

“Shadows…bring softness to every thing. An object and its shadow are softness and hardness.”

Eli Siegel

Everything Has to Do with Hardness and Softness (1969)

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