Quotes About Inspiration

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

The sky was pure opal now.

Genius is lonely.

So often, thought Rami, the ordinary can save us.

The only interesting thing, said François Mitterrand, is to live.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice.

Said, who was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935, was fond of T. S. Eliot's idea that reality could not be deprived of the other echoes that inhabit the garden.

In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can't stop the lines in time, so I'm a novelist.

Me preguntas por qué compro arroz y flores? Compro arroz para vivir y flores para tener algo por lo que vivir.

I am not one who was born with great wisdom. I love the ancients and diligently seek wisdom among them.

Worthy admonitions cannot fail to inspire us, but what matters is changing ourselves. Reverent advice cannot fail to encourage us, but what matters is acting on it. Encouraged without acting, inspired without changing – there's nothing to be done for such people.

It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkeness

When you see a person of worth, concentrate upon becoming their equal.

Find out what people want to do, then tell them to do it. They'll think you're a genius.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction or an amusement or a waste of time is - dead wrong. Books are the most important the most powerful the most beautiful thing humans have ever created.

Eureka!s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—

Great things.

Are you making something up in your head, miss?" —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener