Quotes About Inspiration

Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us... not the person that we are, But the angel we may be.

I did not write it. (Uncle Tom's Cabin) God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

And though it be not so in the physical, yet in moral science that which cannot be understood is not always profitless. For the soul awakes, a trembling stranger, between two dim eternities,—the eternal past, the eternal future. The light shines only on a small space around her; therefore, she needs must yearn towards the unknown; and the voices and shadowy movings which come to her from out the cloudy pillar of inspiration have each one echoes and answers in her own expecting nature.

He invented mother's hearts--& he certainly has the pattern in his own.

Once in an age God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false-imagining, an unreal character, but looking through the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.

Women are the real architects of society.

Writing derives from an accumulation of experience. It's as if you collect facts and observations over time, like a stone to stand on. From there, imagination takes over.

Instead, I value my images by what's in them; what they convey; and how people respond, react, pause while viewing them, or, perhaps, are enlightened by them.

I wanted to be a forest ranger or a coal man. At a very early age, I knew I didn't want to do what my dad did, which was work in an office.

You see, every star hits periods of hardship, It takes a brighter light to inspire them through the darkness.

Writing is traveling through uncharted territory - your mind. You are the first traveler, and your essays are the world's first maps.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

What wonderful things dreams are! They can make you be anything you want and take you anyplace in the world.

The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.

Two bits of advice. One, always write what you love. Two, always write what the market wants. It's not that those two things are in opposition really. It's just that you have to find an intersection between the two. Writing an unmarketable book just strikes me as silly. Writing a book you don't love – now that would be evil.

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.

There I was, listening to four students play something that had been written in another time in another country and it seemed like nothing less than magic. The music was mournful and all I could think about was how unhappy Mr Tchaikovsky must have been when he wrote it. Whatever his pain was, I thought I knew exactly how he felt.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

A lot of the music that you listen to now is because of the things that the Meters did, the Neville Brothers did, and they're there, the guys who invented those beats that the guys sample today. Such an enormous opportunity.

My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.

My Dad is my hero.

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.