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?
Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.
Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
Well, yes. I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy.
It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.
The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
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