Quotes About Inspiration

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.

Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

But, if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from these heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime... But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

One idea lights a thousand candles.

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.

In the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.