Beauty without expression is boring.
Interpretation
Beauty needs to be expressed to have meaning; otherwise, it lacks excitement.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that beauty in its raw form, without any form of expression, becomes tedious and uninspiring. It implies that the essence of beauty is fully realized only when it is conveyed through creativity or emotion, making it engaging and meaningful to both the creator and the observer.
In practice
During an art class, to emphasize the importance of expressing beauty through various mediums.
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?
This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
Art would be useless if the world were perfect.
The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
People love fashion exhibits because they can fantasize. They can respond to a dress even if they can never wear a dress like that.
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