Quotes About Inspiration

Sin sueños no hay vida!

If you build it, he will come.

A ballpark at night is more like a church than a church

Faith is raising the sail of our little boat until it is caught up in the soft winds above and picks up speed, not from anything within itself, but from the vast resources of the universe around us.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

Stimulate the heart to love, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord.

III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough/ This dream itself had all my thought and love

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me ("The Circus Animal's Desertion")

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination

if one writes one can do nothing else.

He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories.