Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

To love beauty is to see light.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.

I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

It is still color, it is not yet light.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

Light is something that can really change your perception of space.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.

What one person might see as violent, someone else may see as beautiful. Maybe even art.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.