"The moment our discourse rises above the..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The passages of Shakespeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century.”
“We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.”
“An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.”
More on Thought
“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.”
“We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.”
“Death - a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.”
More on Creativity
“Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.”
“I did LSD and peyote in the late Sixties, before I got into cocaine. That was concurrent with my change from a straight comic to the album and counterculture period, and those drugs served their purpose. They helped open me up.”
“I never listen to the radio. If it's bad, I make fun of it, and if it's good, I get jealous that I didn't think of it.”