Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

All the great works of art, the cathedrals - the Gothic cathedrals and the splendid Baroque churches - are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.

When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I've also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you've squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.

I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed - they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry.

Art is what we're doing when we do our best work.

I don't want to deal with the underneath while I'm, you know, while I'm making it or while I'm writing it or when I'm making it. Because again, I don't want to hit these nails on the head too strongly.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it.

The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.

Everything around us that we call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you.

Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation.

Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.

Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life, and from their hands it comes in fair, articulate forms to bless the world.

for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.

The work reveals the creator - and as our universe in its vastness, its orderliness, its exquisite detail, tells us something of the One who made it, so a work of fiction, for better or worse, will reveal the writer.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.