Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Art (24 Quotes)

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

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.

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.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen but society has chosen for us.

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

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.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other.... Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

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

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

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.

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

We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

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.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

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 greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

Art is a jealous mistress.

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

We all live amid surfaces, and the true art is to skate well on them.

Life too near paralyses art.

New arts destroy the old.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.