Robert D. Richardson Quotes & Sayings

If death is the end of everything, then living is everything. — Robert D. Richardson

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things. — Robert D. Richardson

[Emerson] was interested not in the bookworm, not even in the thinker, only in Man Thinking. — Robert D. Richardson

Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence. — Robert D. Richardson

Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of science, so is insight more compelling than a history of insight. — Robert D. Richardson