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?
The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.
I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.
Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.
The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.
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