Quotes About Inspiration

For every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness. Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, Thou must,The youth replies, I can.

Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!

Genius has no taste for weaving sand.

Today unbind the captive,So only are ye unbound;Lift up a people from the dust,Trump of their rescue, sound!

The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

I am the owner of the sphere,Of the seven stars and the solar year,Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

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.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.