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?
It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
'The Machinist' changed me. I learned that I really enjoy, literally, not saying a damned word for days at a time, except for what was in the scene. Whole days of... nothing. Just... standing still. I know a lot of people found it bizarre, because they'd be standing right next to me thinking, 'Why aren't we talking? What's going on?'
You could make the most beautiful film, and that weekend it's raining too hard on the East Coast, and no one goes out. Artists should have a chance to do it again. That's the challenge: Women artists don't get a second chance. People-of-color artists don't get a second chance. You're put in director's jail, and that's a wrap.
I have had the good fortune of being able to sing with many of the finest voices in the world, and for someone who loves voices as I do, this is an enormous privilege.
It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.
Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.
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