Quotes About Inspiration

The best sermon is preached by the minister who has a sermon to preach and not by the man who has to preach a sermon.

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.

In literary composition a well-chosen quotation lights up the page like a fine engraving...

...the curious hunter-up of rare quotations... the young and struggling scribbler...

In these pages the novelist should be able to find a striking verse to head his chapter, the raconteur add to his bon mots, the man of the world enrich his stock of maxims, the divine obtain some deep thought drawn from the wells of ancient learning.

Indeed a good quotation hardly ever comes amiss. It is a pleasing break in the thread of a speech or writing, allowing the speaker or writer to retire for an instant while another and greater makes himself heard. And this calling-up of the deathless dead implies also a community of mind with them, which the reader will not grudge the author lest he should seem to deny it to himself.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it...

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.

Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there's one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through tough times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard.

We envy the success of others, when we should emulate the process by which that success came.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence.

Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker.

Hang out with people who are better than you and you cannot help but improve." Pabrai acts on this advice to a degree that would horrify many people. "When I meet someone for the first time, I evaluate them afterwards and say, 'Will it make me better or worse to have a relationship with this person?'" If the answer is worse, he says, "I'll cut him out.

King James said of a minister in his time, he preached as if death was at his back.

What is prayer but the breathing forth of that grace which is breathed into the soul by the Holy Spirit?

Great Tamerlane carried the lives of his ancestors into the field with him, in which he used to read before he gave battle, that he might be stirred up not to stain the blood of his family by cowardice or any unworthy behaviour in fight.

Quote the Scripture rather than men for thy judgment.