Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Lyrical poetry is much the same an every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.

Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.

I'm as old as the moon and the stars, and as young as the trees and the lakes. My style comes from looking at what came before me, and from visiting a lot of places.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

What makes our world so fascinating is that continuously there are novel and creative ideas spurring people to leave old ways and try something new.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

Traditions are lovely thingsto create traditions, that is, not to live off them.

You always want to try and evolve an art form. It's not a very humble ambition; it reeks of arrogance. If you can, you want to try to do something that people haven't done before and give people something that they haven't seen.

I like to break down barriers and I think that Hollywood is doing the same thing over and over. I want to do something new and say, "Let's evolve as artists!"

I think its pretty clear that film is the pre-eminent art form of our age. If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel. Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it.

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.

I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It's only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it's all about.

My goal... not to go back to Rembrandt... but to bring the great tradition and whatever is great about it, up to date.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive.

Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

You cannot play for safety and make art.

Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.