Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Every word was once a poem.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

It's a hard thing to examine and difficult to speak for other writers, but when I look at my own writing there is often too much reticence. And that's a flaw I have as a person as well. I'm too reticent. I'm non-confrontational to a fault. And I'm risk-averse, which probably shows in my sentences. The aversion to long lines, the tendency to strip things back and be spare. My writing is an act of erasure that's tied up with my personality. I can easily produce a ninety thousand word chunk of writing and then cut back and back until I've only got ten thousand words. Or nothing.

I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

I think in most cases, unless you're writing about a character who is garrulous, you say what you've got to say and then get out. Those little conjunctions, those little turnaround words help you do it. That's the way I like to write: I get rid of things rather than add them.

Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

The minute a thing is long and complicated, it confuses. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments made 'em short. They may not always be kept, but they are understood.

There is but one poetry,--true poetry.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

Long note? Yes. Make it seem short.

History after all is the true poetry.

Language is the machine of the poet.