Quotes About Inspiration

Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs drive the sap downward and up again: and almost without awakening it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement. Like the god stepping into the swan.

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour

If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any sound of the world outside reach your senses - would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that.

Every angel is terrible.

If one think he can live without writing, perhaps he should not write at all.

Continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you take part in what is greatest. The more strongly you cultivate this belief inside of you, the more it will give rise to reality and world.

Moving Forward The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. It seems that things are more like me now, that I can see farther into paintings. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my sense, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven, out of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the sky my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.

I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse.

Da gibt es kein Messen mit der Zeit, da gilt kein Jahr, und zehn Jahre sind nichts, Künstler sein heißt: nicht rechnen und zählen; reifen wie der Baum, der seine Säfte nicht drängt und getrost in den Stürmen des Frühlings steht ohne die Angst, daß dahinter kein Sommer kommen könnte. [...] Geduld ist alles!

but there is a great deal of beauty here, because there is beauty everywhere.

I come home from the soaring In which I lost myself. I was song, and the refrain which is God Is still roaring in my ears.

Confessez-vous à vous-même: mourriez-vous s'il vous était défendu d'écrire ?

If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.

Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.

These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who

To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after.

Das Kunstwerk möchte man also erklären: als ein tiefinneres Geständnis, das unter dem Vorwand einer Erinnerung, einer Erfahrung oder eines Ereignisses sich ausgiebt und, losgelöst von seinem Urheber, allein bestehen kann. Diese Selbständigkeit des Kunstwerkes ist die Schönheit. Mit jedem Kunstwerke kommt ein Neues, ein Ding mehr in die Welt.

Und der Künstler ist immer noch dieser: ein Tänzer, dessen Bewegung sich bricht an dem Zwang seiner Zelle. Was in seinen Schritten und dem beschrankten Schwung seiner Arme nicht Raum hat, kommt in der Ermattung von seinen Lippen, oder er muß die noch ungelebten Linien seines Leibes mit wunden Fingern in die Wände ritzen.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height.

to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing… then you are a writer.

Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein, hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein. Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift. Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift, lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los ...

I don't like to write letters while I am traveling, because for letter writing I need more than the most necessary tools: some silence and solitude and a not too familiar hour.