Quotes About Inspiration

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers.

Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find the same process of simplification or selection at work as in the imagination.

Art can do the opposite of glamourizing the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it.

Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.

one must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself

I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.

Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

We want our buildings to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.

În aceast? lume, respectul de sine depinde integral de ceea ce ne mân? de la spate s? fm sau s? facem.

The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.

Most of what makes a book good is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments.

But the museum is only a prelude to a life well lived.

The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder.

a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment... because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.

There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.

the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience'.

at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and boulder-strewn deserts. In their presence one was likely to experience, and could count on being understood if one reported that one had felt, a sense of the sublime.