Quotes About Muse

Wendell Berry warned, "To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain.

However, I've always had the sense that the muse of the tormented artist—while the artist himself is throwing temper tantrums—is sitting quietly in a corner of the studio, buffing its fingernails, patiently waiting for the guy to calm down and sober up so everyone can get back to work.

And are you thinking, Hugh, what I am thinking?

Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress, and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

My joking answer to this question is that I leave a bowl of milk out on the back porch every night for the Idea Fairy. In the morning, the milk is gone and there's a brand-new shiny idea by the bowl.

I've learnt that the muse is like an angry girlfriend. If she comes knocking you better be home because if you're not, she doesn't leave a note saying pick up after 3 P. M. from the post office. The gift she had is gone forever.

In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.

My muse is an ungrateful harlot who's abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.

Sometimes men envisioned a feminine muse who inspired them to poetry, literature, art, or refined sensibility. Women, by contrast, often imagined the soul as a masculine presence that provided wisdom and strength.

To ponder is not to brood or grieve or even meditate. It is to wonder at a deep level.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

Nothingness...there in this placewhere nothingness takesbut for the glimmera steadfast shimmerall would be consumed...

In spite of its romantic frisson, the position of muse is very vague and largely thankless for the muse herself.

For a poet, it will be terrible if there are no women. He will not have anything to write about.

Where he'd mistaken her for his muse, only to find she was actually the keeper of his heart.

But the fact is, she [the muse] won't be summoned. She alights when it damn well pleases her. She falls in love with one artist, then deserts him for another. She's a real bitch!

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

With her first Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,' Rooney Mara gave fashion fans a new Gothic-chic muse.

Sleeping AtlantisSilent cool watersdancing upon her skin ~silent cool waterushering dreams within...

It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it.

Son pocos los individuos a quienes la musa les envía ideas brillantes envueltas para regalo. Los demás nos lo tenemos que currar.

Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.