Quotes About Inspiration

C. P. Snow, the son of a church organist, recalled in 1940 being reassured by listening to Churchill. "He was an aristocrat, but he would cheerfully have beggared his class and friends, and everyone else too, if that was the price of the country coming through. We believed it of him. The poor believed it, as his voice rolled out into the slum streets, those summer evenings of 1940.

In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It is thinking and doing.

I think his success was largely due to his great human qualities: his sense of humor, his common sense and his essential honesty and integrity. He inspired love and unfailing loyalty; he had a magic touch when dealing with conflicting issues or clashes of personalities; and he knew how to find a solution along the lines of compromise, without surrendering a principle. He is, in fact, a great democrat.

Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.

Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

There is an image stuck in my mind, but I have no words for it. It gives me no peace. 'Tis a queer backward way of making verse, like going through a door arse first.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

Great hopes make great men.

Let No Limitation be your Limitation.

When God will have any great matters done, he sets his people's hearts to work at prayer by a kind of gracious instinct. He stirs them up and moves their hearts by the influence of his Holy Spirit.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn.

But knowledge to their eyes her ample pageRich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;Chill penury repress'd their noble rage,And froze the genial current of the soul.

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears.

Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vaultThe pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

But to this day I am convinced that the real reason we met was because Alexander is from Nebraska, and he was completely fascinated that I was about to go off and make a movie with Brando - perhaps the most famous Nebraskan of all.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity