Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.
Interpretation
Art is about perception; it exists in your immediate environment and attitude rather than distant travels.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that art is not a distant treasure to be found in far-off lands but rather something that should be recognized and appreciated in our daily lives and surroundings. If one fails to see the beauty and creativity at home, the search for art in other places becomes futile.
In practice
In a speech to students about recognizing local art and talent.
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?
When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.
One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.
Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!
I think that an industrial process is not like a rubber stamp. Everything has to be put together and, as such, should have its own expression.
I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.
I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.
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