Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth25 May 1803
CountryUnited States of America
The artist must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
The art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.
Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'
In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire
In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.
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.
Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.