Lewis Hyde Quotes & Sayings

Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, at last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. — Lewis Hyde

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. — Lewis Hyde

But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers. — Lewis Hyde

To be a great teacher, you can't simply be looking at how to earn your income. And with a priest or spiritual leader - there's another relationship that makes those lives what they are. And in each of these cases you'll find elements of gift exchange thriving, and you'll also find a tension around it. — Lewis Hyde

Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things. — Lewis Hyde

We would no longer call it an ego at all. The gift leaves all boundary and circles into mystery. The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. Anything contained within a boundary must contain as well its own exhaustion. The — Lewis Hyde

True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers. — Lewis Hyde

We forgive when we give up attachment to our wounds. — Lewis Hyde

Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges. — Lewis Hyde

The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns towards him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum. — Lewis Hyde

An anaesthetic is a poet-killer. — Lewis Hyde

The gift finds the man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own. — Lewis Hyde

A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation. — Lewis Hyde

We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved. — Lewis Hyde

For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world. — Lewis Hyde

What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from ... pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity ... works of art exist simultaneously in two "economies", a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art. — Lewis Hyde

I think of a myth as a story that helps you explain all the different pieces of your life. In that broad sense, there is no way to live without mythology. — Lewis Hyde

Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand. — Lewis Hyde

Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective. — Lewis Hyde

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she as extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity. — Lewis Hyde

That all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods. — Lewis Hyde

I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE — Lewis Hyde

Creativity in science is almost always cumulative and collaborative; it proceeds collectively and thus thrives when barriers to collectivity are reduced. — Lewis Hyde

Nothing is more dangerous to liberty than the power of entailed art and ideas. The very soul of a republic is the common citizen's inalienable access to knowledge. — Lewis Hyde

The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The — Lewis Hyde

An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn. — Lewis Hyde

The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. — Lewis Hyde

We are each born into a situation - a particular body (its race, sex, health ... ), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation - and born into the stories told of each of these. — Lewis Hyde

When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts. — Lewis Hyde

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage. — Lewis Hyde