Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.


Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872 [1876] Ed (ed. 1911)

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a...

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a...

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a...

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a...