Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Love." Essays: First Series, James Munroe and Company, 1841, p. 147.
Randell, a Nobel Laureate brain scientist, is also an art collector, and has studied the brain’s reaction to different kinds of art. There are some people who become so distressed with the burden of using their imagination and expecting not to have to do so, do not have a more intense experience or much of an experience at all as the reject the notion of using their imagination. They see that as the artist’s job and we say of those people that they do not care for abstract art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
