Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.

In my own life, I share my home with works by artists like Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Jackie Windsor and so many others, whose creativity is clear and fresh and compelling; the works break through the usual, and they inspire creativity; they inspire responses and understanding.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.

It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse.

The power of art is as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; it's just where war destroys, art inspires. But in order to inspire, you need to react to it. And, if it doesn't penetrate your mind, you can't react to it.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

[Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.