Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the appreciation for those who can transform abstract desires into tangible creations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the value of individuals who possess the ability to understand and articulate the collective aspirations and ideas of others through the medium of physical materials like stone, wood, steel, and brass. Such individuals are admired not only for their artistic skill but also for their capacity to give form and structure to what is often intangible, thus bridging the gap between thought and reality.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of architecture in shaping our communities, one could use this quote to emphasize the role of architects.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.
Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.
The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.
You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.
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