Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

What is art but a way of seeing?

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

I think everything's fair in art and how you perceive a character.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

We are artists. We are all subjective people; we have a point of view. It doesn't mean we are right.

People said, ‘You must be mad, or on drugs,’ which I found a bit disappointing. What about imagination? It reflects our time that people sooner assume you’re on drugs or mad, rather than free.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly.

I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Organized perception is what art is all about.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.