Quotes About Inspiration

The danger of reading too much is that we shall have only the thoughts of others. The danger of reading too little or none at all, that we shall have none but our own.

I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money.

For I dipt into the future, as far as human eye can see, saw the vision of the world, and the wonder that would be.

The power of Thought,--the magic of the Mind!

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.

Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.

To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.

The power of thought is the magic of the mind.

if i dont write to empty my mind, i go mad

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion.

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earth-quake-they say Poets never or rarely go mad...but are generally so near it-that I cannot help thinking rhyme is so far useful in anticipating & preventing the disorder.

Not in those climes where I have late been straying, Though Beauty long hath there been matchless deemed, Not in those visions to the heart displaying Forms which it sighs but to have only dreamed, Hath aught like thee in truth or fancy seemed: Nor, having seen thee, shall I vainly seek To paint those charms which varied as they beamed— To such as see thee not my words were weak; To those who gaze on thee, what language could they speak?

A drop of ink can make a million think.

The rhyme obliges me to this; sometimes Monarchs are less imperative than rhymes)

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - [Keats] is always frigging his imagination. - I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam of vision produced by raw pork and opium.

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

That part of a work of one author found in another is not of itself piracy, or sufficient to support an action; a man may adopt part of the work of another; he may so make use of another's labors for the promotion of science and the benefit of the public.

There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.

It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science -- it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong," joked Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and the former president of the Royal Society, at Wired 2013.