Quotes About Inspiration

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

....Everyone deserves a chance to fly!

Lance Armstrong, the famous cyclist and more importantly, cancer survivor, has said 'if you ever get a second chance for something, you've got to go all the way.'

I should like to make films that are not lowering to the spirit. A new building can be very harrowing, I should like to give people a chance to whistle.

When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.

In the early seventies, a friend kept saying to me, 'Whatever you do, don't try to make those feelings go away.' His advice went on: 'anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment - anything you can do to work with those things - do it., please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.

Embarking on a spiritual journey is like getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands. With whole hearted practice comes inspiration, but sooner or later we will also encounter fear. For all we know, when we get to the horizon, we are going to drop off the edge of the world. Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.

The basic creative energy of life - life force - bubbles up and courses through all of existence

Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation—proper motivation for living an insightful, compassionate life.

When our mind is full of the warmth of humor, we are in touch with the best of ourselves.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Un buen libro es la preciosa savia del alma de un maestro, embalsamada y atesorada intencionadamente para una vida más allá de la vida.

Ein gutes Buch ist der kostbare Lebenssaft eines meisterlichen Geistes, einbalsamiert und aufbewahrt zum Zweck eines Lebens über das Leben hinaus (...)

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem.

You give birth to them. You do not design them.

Gardening has this embracing quality in that it colours the way you look at the world.

But the point was to be carefree, independent. Artists can't be hampered by the dailiness of ordinary life--Tony felt strongly about that. Doing the same things every day, forever bothered about money. Art has to be freed from all that.

Lowry and Augustus John)

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

As a result of Malory's plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d'Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere , and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.

The presence of water invites song and music; there is something about its flow, and the sound of its flow, that elicits other melodies.

Stealing someone else's words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own.