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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes about Art - Page 5

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No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.

No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Kindness, Philosophy
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.366

He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Men, Civilization
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.367

These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a god- like ease and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Power, Ease
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.518, Harvard University Press

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Country, Art, Children
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2452, Delphi Classics

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Men, Numbers
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.283, Graphic Arts Books

It is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Pain, Apples
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.173, Graphic Arts Books

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wise, Country, Art

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science, and such is the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them. These arts open great gates of a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Determination, Pride
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters”, p.142

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Ambition, Character
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2800, Delphi Classics

In the vaunted works of Art, The master-stroke is Nature's part.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Nature, Masters
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1900*). “Essays”

The true poem is the poet's mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Poetry, Mind
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.244, Library of America

I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friends, Art, Hero
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1365, Delphi Classics

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty, Beautiful, Art
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.529, Library of America

New arts destroy the old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Artist, Destruction
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.93, Graphic Arts Books

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Home, Men
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2005). “The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.241, University of Georgia Press

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Artist, Quality
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.223

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use short and positive speech.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Hero, Saint
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1954). “The Power of Emerson's Wisdom”

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Simple, Men
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.6, Courier Corporation

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Men, Costumes
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Five Foot Shelf of Classics, Vol. V (in 51 Volumes)”, p.86, Cosimo, Inc.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beautiful, Art, Character
1841 Essays: First Series,'Art'.

The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Self, Let It Go
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, Waldo Emerson Forbes (1912). “Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872 [1876] Ed”

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Book, School
Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Essays”, p.10, Xist Publishing

How beautiful to have the church always open, so that every tired wayfaring man may come in and be soothed by all that art can suggest of a better world when he is weary with this.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beautiful, Art, Tired
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1964). “The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.117, Harvard University Press

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art, Creativity, Giving
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.157

No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Country, Art, Travel
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.393

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