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












Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
More Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes
"Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.
"In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine
"Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounce...
"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they ...
"Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator com...
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
"The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
"Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
"It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has...
"Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand an...
"Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among hi...
"Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination...
"One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the credito...