Quotes About Inspiration

Every great achievement was a vision before it became a reality. In that sense, it arose from commitment, not resignation to the inevitable.

Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to enduring fact of mystery.

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

Dreams have always expanded our understanding of reality by challenging our boundaries of the real, of the possible.

Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.

The world's a better place since I chose music.

You'll never know that just sitting across a room full of people, I have transformed you into a goddess. A destroyer of despair.

In my world there would be as many libraries as there are Starbucks.

You are the reason I don't want to die all the time When I am with you life is worth living Time away from you is strange and full of pain When I look into your eyes I can see how life has savaged you It's ok if you fall I will be there to catch you Anyone that would want to hurt you Would have to kill me to do it I will never be able to pound words into lines To match the velocity of your presence

Music makes life possible.

For me, many albums are much more than a collection of songs. They're testaments to the courage to live above the minimum requirements of merely getting by.

I think that Bruce Springsteen should do a little number about a 7-Eleven in Asbury Park but write it in such a way that the entire U.S.A. can identify and slurp along with Bruce. Suck for the Boss. Hail the Boss! Hail 7-Eleven!