A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signature of existence, as a pure ensemble existence. But he can only put these in order by discovering the orchestral analogies in things themselves. The result will be “the hymn, harmony and joy ordered in the sharpest and most vivid circumstances of their interrelations. Man charged with divine vision has no other mode of expression save the parallelism of pages as a means of expressing the links, the whims, the limpidity on which he gazes.” [Quote by Stephane Mallarmé]
"Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 49, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 15
Year: 1954
Chapters: Harmony | Living Unity
↪ Also at #3574
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan