Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man.

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.

Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.

But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details.

Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.

Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

A circle may be small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one.

He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable.

As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.

Everything tries to be round.

Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.

O the eye's light is a noble gift of Heaven! All beings live from light, each fair created thing; the very plants turn with a joyful transport to the light.

Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.

Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks.