It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
Interpretation
Art helps us to appreciate and understand beauty in the world around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the vital role of art in shaping our ability to perceive beauty. While beauty surrounds us, our natural perception may be clouded or unclear, and it is through art that we can refine our vision and appreciation for what is beautiful in life.
In practice
During a gallery opening, I shared Emerson's quote to emphasize the transformative power of art.
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?
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a momentβs silence, "Perhaps more so.
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.