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?
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
Any artist, when he goes in to record, should have the feeling that any song he records can be a hit. This may sound egotistical, but it makes sense.
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
Is he on his horse? O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!
When I'm dying, I want to think I did what I felt was best for the words I was writing. This may mean, at any time, that I won't be publishable anymore.
For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.
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