Quotes About Inspiration

A remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers and warmed and cheered all our hearts.

for ambition stirs imagination nearly as much as imagination excites ambition.

Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.

We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.

some day, in a time of shame and trouble, a second great Prophet will arise—a Mahdi who shall lead the faithful nearer God and sustain the religion.

Wyclif, who died in 1384, had appealed to the conscience of his age. Baffled, though not silenced, in England, his inspiration stirred a distant and little-known land, and thence disturbed Europe. Students from Prague had come to Oxford, and carried his doctrines, and indeed the manuscripts of his writings, to Bohemia. From this sprang the movement by which the fame of John Huss eclipsed that of his English master and evoked the enduring national consciousness of the Czech people.

It is sometimes pretended that the League of Nations was an American inspiration forced and foisted upon Europe against its froward inclination. The facts are different.

There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.

Here we stir the embers of the past and light the beacons of the future. Old flags are raised anew; the passions of vanished generations awake; beneath the shell-torn soil of the twentieth century the bones of long dead warriors and victims are exposed, and the wail of lost causes sounds in the wind.

And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who were worthy—and why try to stuff it into those who are not?—and knowledge and thought would open the 'magic casements' of the mind.

One begins to see, for instance, that painting a picture is like fighting a battle; and trying to paint a picture is, I suppose, like trying to fight a battle. It is, if anything, more exciting than fighting it successfully. But the principle is the same.

Some at least of its impulse came from the Admiralty.

Painting is complete as a distraction. I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body more entirely absorbs the mind.

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field

Winston S. Churchill

Winston S. Churchill

It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous I don't know....That is why I value that little phrase I don't know so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended...Poets, if they're genuine, must always keep repeating I don't know.

I've wanted to write about them for a long while, but it's a tricky subject, always put off for later and perhaps worthy of a better poet, even more stunned by the world than I. But time is short. I write.

I let myself be invented, modeled on my own reflection in his eyes. I dance, dance, dance in the stir of sudden wings.   The

I've wanted to write about them for a long while, but it's a tricky subject, always put off for later and perhaps worthy of a better poet, even more stunned by the world than I. But time is short. I write.

Leggere libri è il gioco più bello che l'umanità abbia inventato.

Even poetry has its prosaic side.

Read good poetry and read it well, tracing the countless incarnations of every word. These are after all the same words lying dead in dictionaries or leading a gray life in speech. Then why do they shine like new in poems, as if the poet had just discovered them?