Quotes About Inspiration

Imitation cannot go above its model.

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

There are no days in life that are so memorable as those that vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

Great men exist that there may be greater men.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self

Thought is the bud, language the blossom and action the fruit behind it.

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams