Quotes About Inspiration

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.

Men should take their knowledge from the Sun, the Moon and the Stars.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome,And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,Wrought in a sad sincerity;Himself from God he could not free;He builded better than he knew—The conscious stone to beauty grew.

God enters by a private door into each individual.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.

Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind.

Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.

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

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .

A true friend is somebody who can make us do what we can.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind.