Quotes About Inspiration

Until now, I had reckoned only that I had not the 'gift' for writing; now M. de Norpois took from me the ambition also.

l tempo di cui disponiamo ogni giorno è elastico: le passioni che proviamo lo dilatano, quelle che ispiriamo lo restringono, e l'abitudine lo colma.

In every work of art we can recognise the man the artist has most hated, and alas, even the women he has most loved. They were posing for the writer at the very moment when, against his will, they were making him suffer the most.

Amava-a, lamentava não ter tido tempo nem a inspiração de ofendê-la, de fazer-lhe mal, de forçá-la a se lembrar de mim. Achava-a tão linda que desejaria retroceder para gritar-lhe, erguendo os ombros: "Como a acho feia, ridícula, como você me repugna".

And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.

She said merely that it was a delightful pastime because, even if the flowers that sprang from the brush were nothing wonderful, at least the work made you live in the company of real flowers, of the beauty of which, especially when you were obliged to study them closely in order to draw them, you could never grow tired.

Even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and create an atmosphere.

But great talent, even when its existence is not yet recognised, will inevitably provoke certain phenomena of admiration, such as the landlord had managed to detect in the questions asked by more than one English lady visitor, athirst for information as to the life led by Elstir, or in the number of letters that he received from abroad.

All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it

Persuadé que mes pensées eussent paru pure ineptie à cet esprit parfait, j'avais tellement fait table rase de toutes, que quand par hasard il m'arriva d'en rencontrer, dans tel livres, une que j'avais déjà eue moi-même, mon cœur se gonflait comme si un Dieu dans sa bonté me l'avait rendue, l'avait déclarée légitime et belle.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering...

Let the intellect get to work; in the course of it there will be more than enough sorrows to enable him to finish it.

That art had become a poor and pitiable thing. It was no longer inhabited by a deep-rooted soul.

Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner,

Those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

La vraie vie, [...] c'est la littérature.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.

This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.

Et voici que le monde(qui n'a pas été créé une fois, mais aussi souvent qu'un artiste original est survenu) nous apparait entièrement différent de l'ancien, mais parfaitement clair.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of a spiritual life. It can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.

as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.

Nous sentons très bien que notre sagesse commence où celle de l'auteur finit, et nous voudrions qu'il nous donnât des réponses, quand tout ce qu'il peut faire est de nous donner des désirs.