Quotes About Inspiration

This is tantamount to saying, "My hand is weak. I cannot draw a straight line,—that is, a line which will be the shortest line between two given points,—and so, in order to make it more easy for myself, I, intending to draw a straight, will choose for my model a crooked line." The weaker my hand, the greater the need that my model should be perfect.

Como se através de uma janela aberta num quarto abafado soprasse de repente um ar fresco do campo, assim também soprou, no abatido estado-maior de Kutúzov, a mocidade, a energia e a convicção da vitória que vinham daquela juventude radiosa que chegara a galope.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart.

Those who can raise their thoughts to heaven will always have clear days, because the sun always shines above the clouds.

Forse, io amo in lei la natura, la personificazione di quanto c'è di bello nella natura; ma non è che io abbia una volontà mia propria: attraverso me, c'è ad amarla non so quale forza elementare, la creazione intera; tutta la natura infonde quest'amore nell'anima mia, e mi dice: ama!

Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.

After reading Tolstoy's lengthy essay "On Life" in 1889, Ernest Crosby, a thirty-three-year-old American diplomat who was working in Egypt at the time, decided that diplomacy wasn't his calling and instead dedicated the next twenty-seven years of his life to writing and lecturing about Tolstoy throughout the United States.

God's spirit, living inside you, will reward you instantly, and this spiritual reward is better than anything anyone else can give you.

The theme is everything. Once one has a theme, it is easy to embroider on it.

My poor husband is enduring pains and hunger in Jewish taverns, but the news which I have inspires me yet more.

the most experienced and skilful painter-technician would be unable, for all his mechanical ability, to paint anything unless the boundaries of the content were first revealed to him.

He studied the people of Moscow at the theaters, in the clubs, in the streets, looking for the types he needed. A great many of his fictional characters, if not all of them, had real-life models.

They died out there, in countless numbers, not for government officials in Berlin, but for their old countries, gilded by the centuries, and for their common fatherland, Europe, the Europe of Virgil and Ronsard, the Europe of Erasmus and Nietzsche, of Raphael and Dürer, the Europe of St. Ignatius and St. Theresa, the Europe of Frederick the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Cuando pensamos en lo que hemos sido capaces de hacer en el pasado, cuando pensamos que fueron las Cruzadas, esos miles de hombres que partieron para entregar la tumba de Cristo, ya no podemos desesperarnos de los hombres: son capaces de todos los esfuerzos

No hay más remedio que alimentar el espíritu, para no dejarse caer en el embrutecimiento, en la suciedad, en la mediocridad

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

My method of writing is to take the most basic kind of line and improvise on it. After all, I am the child of the culture which created Jazz.

God gave me the strength to see, and breathe, and talk.

Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.

Like so many creative men of his school he was hounded by an incessant restlessness.

I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.

Too many writers start with a good idea and carry it through the first chapters, then fall apart because they had no idea where the top of the mountain was in the first place.

A wall of books is a wall of windows.