Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Good taste" is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness; and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.

You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.

Art is a sense of magic.

What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

I like the ideology of there being no such thing as perfection. But I'm of the opinion that I have witnessed perfection at various times, especially in art.

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It's definitely one of my greatest joys, and I'm a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.