Quotes About Inspiration

Even now I often ask myself: perhaps love produces a feeling of inspiration similar to that experienced by an artist or a poet?

I was astounded at the passion and fire of the melody itself. I could not describe it then, nor can I now. Was it just his voice or something more tangible emerging from his very soul that could arouse such emotion in another person, and bring one's innermost thoughts to life?

This is not a feel-good book. (But I am confident you will feel good after reading it.) It is not a motivational book. (But I promise you will be motivated once you are done.)

As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

I have so many ideas; there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know; one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.

My theory of the uses of fiction is that benificent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality.

Come here into the hollow of my conscience I will show you a thing or two I will show you the heat of my love. You know what? I can give you babies too Real leaders of tomorrow Right here under the bridge I can give you real leaders of thought.

The life of the imagination is a vital element of our total nature. If we starve it or pollute it the quality of our life is depressed or soiled.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

one way to motivate a switch is to shrink the change, which makes people feel "big" relative to the challenge.

The story's power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act).

One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they're already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.

So if you reach the Riders of your team but not the Elephants, team members will have understanding without motivation. If you reach their Elephants but not their Riders, they'll have passion without direction. In

And that's the charge for all of us: to defy the forgettable flatness of everyday work and life by creating a few precious moments.

How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/or connection.

Some powerful defining moments contain all four elements. Think of YES Prep's Senior Signing Day: the ELEVATION of students having their moment onstage, the INSIGHT of a sixth grader thinking That could be me, the PRIDE of being accepted to college, and the CONNECTION of sharing the day with an arena full of thousands of supportive people. (See the footnote for a mnemonic to remember this framework for defining moments.)

Creating more memorable and meaningful experiences is a worthy goal—

You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, "I've always been a believer that if I've got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.

Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many

The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let

Mother Teresa once said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." In

It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative.