Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The artistic part of us all - I think that the easiest way to appreciate this - is through architecture. Architecture is very impressive; the beauty of buildings, temples.

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

A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.

In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.

When you have a brush in your hand, inking a beautiful woman is a lot like running your hands over her.

All of the great music ever written is based upon the Mass. I mean, it's pretty extraordinary stuff, and I think it's done the world some good. And if you take a look at some of the mosques in the world, it calls you to worship the kind of beauty that's in there.

The beauty of architecture is it involves work that stretches over a very long time but often starts in one instant, with just one emotion, a kind of instinctual response.

Every man in creating the beautiful appearance of the dream worlds is a perfect artist.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.

The ideas choose me, not the other way around.

For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.

Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.