quotations about inspiration
Once you become a professional athlete or once you do anything well, then you're automatically a role model ... I have no problem being a role model. I love it. I have kids looking up to me and hopefully I inspire these kids to do good things.
LEBRON JAMES
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 10, 2005
Inspiration, move me brightly, light the song with sense and color, hold away despair.
ROBERT HUNTER
"Lady With a Fan", Terrapin Station
When inspiration does not come, I go for a walk, go to the movie, talk to a friend, let go... The muse is bound to return again, especially if I turn my back!
JUDY COLLINS
attributed, Wise Highs
Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.
SRI AUROBINDO
Thoughts and Aphorisms
I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament -- temperament is the word -- I know nothing.
EDGAR DEGAS
attributed, Impressions and Opinions
Inspiration developed the noblest fantasies of the ancients.
JULES JANIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
I leave the myth of inspiration and agonised creative inaction to the amateurs. The practice of a profession entails discipline, which for me meant the production of two thousand words of fair copy every day, weekends included.
ANTHONY BURGESS
You've Had Your Time
Inspiration is communion with God.
ST. ISIDORUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Trumps of Doom
The Cauldron of Wisdom and Inspiration must be kept boiling for a year and a day, and then the first three drops from it would impart ultimate knowledge to the one who drank them. But the rest of the liquid would be deadly poison.
JENNIFER COCHRANE
"The Tale of Taliesin", Encyclopedia Mythica
We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is, the more he is inspired by glory.
CICERO
Pro archia
As noble Art has survived the noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration.
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
attributed, Marry Your Muse: Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity
There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH
Blood, Bread and Poetry
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Let my inspiration flow, in token lines suggesting rhythm, that will not forsake me, till my tale is told and done.
ROBERT HUNTER
"Lady With a Fan", Terrapin Station
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
ITALO CALVINO
"Cybernetics and Ghosts", The Literature Machine
Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professional know that if they relied on inspiration, they'd be amateurs.
PHILIP PULLMAN
"Q&As", official website
Inspiration may be best defined, according to the representations of the Scriptures themselves, as an extraordinary Divine agency upon teachers while giving instruction, whether oral or written, by which they were taught what and how they should write or speak.
G. C. KNAPP
attributed, Day's Collacon
They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.
ERIC HOFFER
Reflections on the Human Condition