10 Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Creativity

Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes on creativity

4. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

36. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

42. Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

140. For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

196. Art is a jealous mistress.

258. Science does not know its debt to imagination.

260. The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

265. Every really able man, in whatever direction he work, - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,-if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

279. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.'

300. The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.