Ralph Waldo Emerson Art Quotations [Page 2]

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.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

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.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Life too near paralyses art.

He decided to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living.

New arts destroy the old.

Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.

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.

Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

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

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

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.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Thou art to me a delicious torment.