Quotations - Inspiration and.......

• Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.  Brendan Francis Behan
• We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
  Frank Tibolt
• An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.  Arnold H. Glasow
• Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. Henry David Thoreau

Artists

• Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.   Percy Bysshe Shelley (2)
• Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.   Jean Anouilh  
• The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product.   Grace Glueck
• Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge --they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.  Vissarion Belinsky
• I came back to performing with a different attitude about performing and myself. I wasn't expecting perfection any more, just hoping for an occasional inspiration.   Neil Diamond
• I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.  Socrates 
• The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.  Ralph Waldo Emerson 
• 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 
• The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Conversation avec Picasso, in Cahiers d'Art, volume 10, number 10 (1935; translated in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, 1946).    Artlex   
• For make no mistake about it, work for an artist is a highly conscious, rational process at the end of which the work of art emerges as mastered reality-- not at all a state of intoxicated inspiration.   Ernst Fischer
• In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!  Henry Miller, 
• If you’re going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.  Madonna
• The artist....knowing that he can never create anything on his own account, out of the top layers of his personal consciousness, he submits obediently to the workings of inspiration; and knowing that the medium in which we works has its own self nature, which must not be ignored or overridden, he makes himself its patient servant and, in this way, achieves freedom of expression. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
• 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.  Adrienne Rich
• "The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses, would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist . . . what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings."
  Plato (c. 428/7 - 348/7 BCE), Greek philosopher, Phaedrus. See Muses.

Beauty

• Only this is true, that beauty is very beautiful, and softens, and comforts, and inspires, and rouses, and lifts up, and never fails.  Edward Burne-Jones
• Far away in the sunshine are my highest inspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead.   Louisa May Alcott

Blocks

• When you work only for yourself, or for your own personal gain, your mind will seldom rise above the limitations of an undeveloped personal life. But when you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break your bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. Patanjali, 2^nd century bc
• You know that you cannot be truly effective as an agent of change of the world until you have become yourself increasingly one with God; all your commitment, then, must be used to become an ever clearer instrument for the Divine to use for the benefit of others. It is vital to remember that practice done merely for the self can never liberate you from your self. Andrew Harvey, author The Direct Path
• I have not worked at all...Nothing seems worth putting down-I seem to have nothing to say-It appalls me but that is the way it is. Georgia O'Keeffe

Brainstorming

• If people will sit down at their typewriters every morning and begin to word associate every single morning, it will bring all this stuff up. Ray Bradbury, quoted in The Right Brain Experience

Channel

• The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel. Piet Mondrian 

Criticism  

• An essential characteristic of the creative state is that one’s critical faculty which normally inhibits all new ideas is completely switched off. Thus ideas are born, many of which will be killed when the critical faculty is switched on again, but others can be followed up by further ideas which meet the criticisms if one is still in the creative state. Meredith Thring, How to Invent.

Desperation

• In life you need either inspiration or desperation. Anthony Robbins
• Who knows where inspiration comes from? Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.  Amy Tan 
• The greatest inspiration is often born of desperation.  Comer Cotrell 
• Well, I have a lot to write about because we all know torment and misery provide inspiration. anonymous

Devine Inspiration /Religion

• No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum
• We get new ideas from God every hour of our day when we put our trust in Him -- but we have to follow that inspiration up with perspiration -- we have to work to prove our faith. Remember that the bee that hangs around the hive never gets any honey.   Albert E. Cliffe
• Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow hoping for their recurrence.  Ned Rorem 
• I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.  Harriet Beecher Stowe 
• IMBECILITY, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary. Ambrose Bierce
• The music of this opera {Madame Butterfly] was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communication it to the public. Giacomo Puccini   
• Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God. Johannes Brahms  
• We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself.   
• Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.   Bible, Psalms 119:105
• To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in this treasure house, the Bible?   Elizabeth II
• KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.  Ambrose Bierce 
• The inspiration of the almighty gives man understanding.  Bible
• The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.  George Santayana
• God creates by intuition; man creates by inspiration, strengthened by observation. (II.2.i) Victor Hugo FanSpace: Verified Quotes

Discipline

• At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it.  G.L. Glegg, The Design of Design

Dream state

• The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.  Walter Scott
•  It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.   John Steinbeck

Drugs

• "At a purely chemical level, every experience humans find enjoyable - whether listening to music, embracing a lover, or savoring chocolate - amounts to little more than an explosion of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens as exhilarating and ephemeral as a firecracker. J Madelaine Nash

Enthusiasm 

• Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great. Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised. Christian Nestell Bovee
• Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements. Giacomo Puccini
• Inspiration demands that active cooperation of the intellect joined with enthusiasm, and it is under such conditions that marvelous conceptions, with all that is excellent and divine, come into being.   Giorgio Vasari  - in Crofton, A Dictionary of Art Quotations
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The Experience 

• This time was one of intellectual intoxication. My sensations resembled those one has after climbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mist suddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in every directions. For years I had been endeavoring to analyze the fundamental notions of mathematics, such as ordinal and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be definitive answers to the problems which had baffled me for years... Intellectually, the month of September 1900 was the highest point of my life.  Bertrand Russell, quoted in Understanding the Infinite by Shaughan Lavine.
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Fragility

• Inspiration is a fragile thing... just a breeze, touching the green foliage of a city park, just a whisper from the soul of a friend. Just a line of verse clipped from some book. Inspiration... who can say where it is born, and why it leaves us? Who can tell the reasons for its being or not being? Only this... I can think. Inspiration comes from the Heart of Heaven to give the lift of wings, and the breath of divine music to those of us who are earthbound.   Margaret Sangster 

Friendship

• The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.   Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.  Pearl Sydenstricker Buck 
• There is great comfort and inspiration in the feeling of close human relationships and its bearing on our mutual fortunes - a powerful force, to overcome the "tough breaks" which are certain to come to most of us from time to time.   Walt Disney
• . . . we need to feel the cheer and inspiration of meeting each other, we need to gain the courage and fresh life that comes from the mingling of congenial souls, of those working for the same ends.  Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin 

Genius 

• "Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
  Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931),  Life, 1932, chapter 24. 
• "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. As a result, a genius is often a talented person who has simply done all of his homework." Thomas Edison
• The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration.  Philip Hamerton
• He who would have you believe that he is waiting for the inspiration of genius, is in reality at a loss how to begin, and is at last delivered with difficulty and pain.  Joshua Reynolds
• What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.  Eugene Delacroix
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History

• The stories of past courage... can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.   John F. Kennedy
• While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.  Ronald Wilson Reagan 
• The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.  Israel Zangwill 

• Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art.  The least of man's original emanation is better that the best of a borrowed thought.  Albert Pinkham Ryder - In Crofton, A dictionary of Art Quotations

Impulse

• I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.  Beryl Markham
• "Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you." Robert Henri (1865-1929), American painter. 

Loss

• Excellent ideas come to me every moment and if instead of executing them at the very moment they are clothed with the charm imagination lends them . . . one forgets, or what is worse, one no longer finds any interest in what seemed inspiring. Delacroix

Love

• Love is a constant source of inspiration, surprise, and wonderment.  Gloria Estefan

Madness

• One has often known many a wise word to come from a mouth reputed foolish; for that kind of madness, which uneducated and stupid people call folly, really may mean inspiration.  Guillaume De La Pierre

Method

• Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.  Benjamin Cardozo 

Motivation 

• Motivation is an external, temporary high that PUSHES you forward. Inspiration is a sustainable internal glow which PULLS you forward.  Giuseppe Mazzini ???

Muse

• O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention!  William Shakespeare, Henry V
• Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: 'Fool!' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'  Philip Sidney 
• 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 
• There is a deity within us who breathes that divine fire by which we are animated. Publius Ovidius Naso

Music

• Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction. Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands.  Leopold Stokowski

Nature

•  Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.  Frank Lloyd Wright 
• The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.  Henry Moore 
• The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.  Claude Monet
• Man does not bring to God’s altar the stuff of nature in itself, in its initial structure, but something he has made and molded out of nature for the nourishment and the inspiration of men.   Wilford O Cross

Negative inspiration

• A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.  Rita Mae Brown 
• My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.  Cole Porter
• You should mistrust everything which resembles inspiration, for that is often nothing more than deliberate determination and forced excitement, voluntarily caused, on which did not come of itself; besides, we don't live in inspiration; Pegasus walks more often than he gallops, genius consists in showing how to make him take the pace requested... Gustave Hubert 

Notebook

• Inspiration comes whenever it wants, even at the most unlikely times and in the most inappropriate situations. Often it arrives bit by bit. Therefore it must be anchored, and this is where a most valuable item makes its appearance: the notebook.  Piero Ferrucci
• Sometimes an idea comes in the night when I have to get up and strike a light and note it down — sometimes when out on a lonely walk, when I have had to stop and with half-frozen fingers jot down a few words which should keep the new-born [conceived?] idea from perishing — but whatever or however it comes, it comes of itself [i.e. it cannot be forced to come]. Lewis Carroll.
•  The idea when it comes suddenly into the mind with the glow of inspiration must be noted down before it fades or is lost.  Rosamond Harding, The Anatomy of Inspiration.
• Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.  Henry David Thoreau 
• When having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting thoughts have suggested themselves, I conquer bodily indolence and rise and record them in these books . . . my thoughts crowd each other to death. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet
• Never put off. The instant lightning strikes, jump out of your chair and run and do the poem or the story or the novel . . . I swim. Swimming is wonderful, the total thing of the whole body. And lying in the sun and reading poetry. Then I run back and forth all day from the pool to the typewriter. Ray Bradbury to Marilee Zdenek — The Right Brain Experience
• Ideas are elusive, slippery things. Best to keep a pad of paper and a pencil at your bedside, so you can stab them during the night before they get away. Earl Nightingale
• The thoughts that come often unsought, and is it were drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again John Locke.
• one must hurry to set them down out of fear of forgetting them. They come once; once only.  Jean Cocteau
• Find Quote about inspiration and notebook by  Beethoven.

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Optimism 

• The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45)  German Protestant theologian

Passion

• Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.  Henry David Thoreau 

Planning

• Inspiration means that you don't have to figure things out, or think about them. Ideas and answers pop into your head and the energy carries you forward, if you allow it. Planning… is a way of ritually killing inspiration, which transcends the need for planning. Chuck Spezzano

Quotes

• Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired.   Richard Kemph

Relationships

• I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse.  Benjamin Spock 
• Love and respect woman. Look to her not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you have none.  Joseph Mazzini

Reason

• Cease trying to work everything out with your minds. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be Revelation.  Eileen Caddy
• 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
• I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.  Doris Lessing
• A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. Michelangelo

Risk 

• Risk is essential. There is not growth of inspiration in staying within what is safe and comfortable. Once you find out what you do best, why not try something else?  Alex Noble

Role models

•  I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.  Ruth Benedict

Science

• Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

Seeking

• The longing to produce great inspirations didn't produce anything but more longing.  Sophie Kerr
• In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder.    John Masefield
• Find your inspiration and hone in on it.  Susan Longacre
• As I grow older, part of my emotional survival plan must be to actively seek inspiration instead of passively waiting for it to find me.  Bebe Moore Campbell
• . . inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it.  Lisa Alther

Self-consciousness

• Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness -- I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.  Aaron Copland

Solitude

• One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.  Brenda Ueland
• You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Austrian writer of stories and novels.  Artlex   
• When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer--say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep--it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
• When I am entirely alone and of good cheer — say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly . . . how they come I do not know and I cannot force them . . . Those ideas that please me I retain in my memory and am accustomed to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments . . . All this fires my soul and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becoming methodised and defined . . .  (Mozart, letter to a friend).
• On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn't going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. Albert Einstein
• When that time comes, I try to be alone and silent for several hours.; I need a lot of time to rid my mind of the noise outside and to cleanse my memory of life's confusion. I light candles to summon the muses and guardian spirits. I place flowers on my desk to initiate tedium and the complete works of Pablo Neruda beneath the computer with the hope they will inspire me by osmosis. If computers can be infected with a virus there's no reason why they shouldn't be refreshed by a breath of poetry. In a secret ceremony I prepare my mind and soul to receive the first sentence in a trance, so the door may open slightly and allow me to peer through and perceive the hazy outlines of the story waiting for me.  Isobel Allende,  'Paula'

Society

• Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.  Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson 
• As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.  John Keble

Spirit

• Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.  Henry David Thoreau

Spontaneity

• I like the idea of being as close to the original thought or voice as possible and not to falsify it by editing. John Ashbery,  Plimpton 1987, p. 198
• . . . inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it.  Lisa Alther
• What to do when inspiration doesn't come: Be careful not to spook, get the wind up, force things into position. You must wait around until the idea comes.  John Huston
•  I like the inspiration of the first take.  Clint Eastwood
• It often happens that these rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and the powers of those who never know when to leave off.   Giorgio Vasari - in Crofton, A Dictionary of Art Quotations
• The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.  Walter Scott

Subconscious

• In the creative act there is an upward surge from some unknown, fertile, underground layers of the mind.  Koestler

Success

• He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.   Bessie Anderson Stanley 

Sudden

•  Everyone uses from time to time such expressions as 'a thought pops up', an idea comes 'from the blue', or 'dawns' or 'comes as through out of a dream' or 'it suddenly hit me'. ....Breakthrough of ideas from some depth below the level of your awareness.  (i.e.. you unconsciousness. ) Rollo May, artist way p 237.
• This time was one of intellectual intoxication. My sensations resembled those one has after climbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mist suddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in every directions. For years I had been endeavoring to analyze the fundamental notions of mathematics, such as ordinal and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be definitive answers to the problems which had baffled me for years... Intellectually, the month of September 1900 was the highest point of my life.  Bertrand Russell, quoted in Understanding the Infinite by Shaughan Lavine.
•  The idea when it comes suddenly into the mind with the glow of inspiration must be noted down before it fades or is lost (Rosamond Harding — The Anatomy of Inspiration).
• Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.  Robert Browning

Technique

• Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.  Rudolf Nureyev
• Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.  Benjamin Cardozo 

Teaching

• The mediocre teacher tells.
  The good teacher explains.
  The superior teacher demonstrates.
  The great teacher inspires.
       William Arthur Ward
•  The good teacher ... discovers the natural gifts of his pupils and liberates them by the stimulating influence of the inspiration that he can impart. The true leader makes his followers twice the men they were before.  Stephen Neill
• Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information.  E. Franklin Frazier (1894 - 1962) US sociologist, educator  In "My Soul Looks Back, 'Less I Forget," by Dorothy Winbush Riley, 1995.
•  Inspired teachers...cannot be ordered by the gross from the factory. They must be discovered one by one, And brought home from the woods and swamps like orchids. They must be placed in a conservatory, not in a carpenter shop; And they must be honored and trusted.   John Jay Chapman  
• "Allow me to say that Father Bach has been a strong inspiration to me, and that many a print reached definite form in my mind while I was listening to the lucid, logical language he speaks."
  Maurits Cornelius Escher (1898-1972), Dutch graphic artist.
• "What to do to inspire my students? I don't know, other than to teach as well as I can and to hope my own times of study and reflection create insights that force their way into all things that I say and do in a day." E. Sanders, writing in NEA Higher Education Thought and Action Journal, summer 2001.

Thoughts

• Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.  Robert Browning

Travel

• I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring.  Dodie Smith 

Values

• When you work only for yourself, or for your own personal gain, your mind will seldom rise above the limitations of an undeveloped personal life. But when you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break your bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. Patanjali, 2^nd century bc
• Far away in the sunshine are my highest inspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see the beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead. - Louisa May Alcott

Waiting 

• wait
• All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.  Igor Stravinsky
• You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Austrian writer of stories and novels.  Artlex  
•  recall the words of Rollo May, describing how the artist sat before this easel and played with the paints. He did not plough on and produce a painting by virtue of his own mechanical striving, but waited patiently for inspiration and insights to come first.
• What to do when inspiration doesn't come: Be careful not to spook, get the wind up, force things into position. You must wait around until the idea comes.  John Huston 
•  When your Daemon is in charge do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait and obey’ Rudyard Kipling
•  The artist must cultivate this mood, wait for it, and seek to stimulate it, sometimes by gazing at their paints or even brushing random patterns on the canvas . . . sparked by the artist’s encountering the brilliant colours on the palette or the inviting white roughness of the canvas . . . It is a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move.  Rollo May, The Courage to Create 
• don't wait
• Don't wait for inspiration. It's a romantic notion that you wait around for that "aha!" revelation, and then work like mad to finish. The successful artist works day after day through blocks, bad habits, and distractions. There is no perfect time to begin. Begin now. Lee Silber
• You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.  Jack London
• We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.  Frank Tibolt
• The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration.  Philip Hamerton
• If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street.  Ben Nicholas
• He who would have you believe that he is waiting for the inspiration of genius, is in reality at a loss how to begin, and is at last delivered with difficulty and pain.  Joshua Reynolds - in Crofton, A Dictionary of Art Quotations
• As I grow older, part of my emotional survival plan must be to actively seek inspiration instead of passively waiting for it to find me.  Bebe Moore Campbell
• We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood without endeavoring to meet it half way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination . . . I am glad I have not followed in the steps of some of my Russian colleagues, who have no self-confidence and are so impatient that at the least difficulty they are ready to throw up the sponge. This is why, in spite of great gifts, they accomplish so little, and that in an amateur way. Tchaikovsky
• Setting the task aside
• Then, when the first moment has passed, I put the canvas aside, facing the wall, and get on with living; but I feel it ‘working’ within me. Then one day, and a completely unexpected way, something is triggered: I pick up the painting again, and, as I proceed, a host of new ideas come in. It is like being in a state of drunkenness. That is how I paint. Joan Miro
• Stay quietly centred, and be patient. The overall picture will form from an amalgam of perhaps hundreds of individual insights; not one of which must be ignored . . . Generally I find that people have been educated to mistrust such phenomena and that they are partially conscious of inhibiting them. Insights which do arrive as fresh intuition or inspiration are not valued . . . not permitted to enter the arena of professional work.   Matchett, The Road to True Professionalism 

Wealth

• Wealth is not a matter of intelligence it's a matter of inspiration.  Jim Rohn

Work

• Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.   Thomas Alva Edison
• We get new ideas from God every hour of our day when we put our trust in Him -- but we have to follow that inspiration up with perspiration -- we have to work to prove our faith. Remember that the bee that hangs around the hive never gets any honey.  Albert E. Cliffe
• Coaching isn't a great mystery. It's Just hard work, determination, and inspiration at the right moment.  Bob Zuppke
• Inspiration comes of working every day.  Charles Baudelaire 
• "Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it." Madeleine L'Engle (1918-), American novelist.
• Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.  Igor Stravinsky 
• Ninety per cent of inspiration is perspiration.  Proverb
• We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.  Frank Tibolt
• You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.  Jack London
• 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
• From Homer invoking the Muse down to Herrick prosaically noting that every day is not good for verses -- from the romantic talking of his 'genius' to Emerson declaring that there was a great deal of  inspiration in a chest of good tea -- they all unequivocally declare that the words ... will not come for the asking, are rare and wooed with hard labour.   C S Lewis
• Don't wait for inspiration. It's a romantic notion that you wait around for that "aha!" revelation, and then work like mad to finish. The successful artist works day after day through blocks, bad habits, and distractions. There is no perfect time to begin. Begin now. Lee Silber
• Inspiration is a guest who does not like to visit lazy people. Tchaikowsky
• We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood without endeavoring to meet it half way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination . . . I am glad I have not followed in the steps of some of my Russian colleagues, who have no self-confidence and are so impatient that at the least difficulty they are ready to throw up the sponge. This is why, in spite of great gifts, they accomplish so little, and that in an amateur way. Tchaikovsky
• I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.  Peter De Vries 
• For make no mistake about it, work for an artist is a highly conscious, rational process at the end of which the work of art emerges as mastered reality-- not at all a state of intoxicated inspiration. Ernst Fischer (contemporary), British [?]. The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach.    Artlex    
• I am certain that many, many people have waked up in the middle of the night with a flash of inspiration about some novel they would like to write, or a play or a poem or whatever and that most inspiration never come to anything. Inspirations are a dime a dozen. The difference between inspiration and the final product, for example, Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace', is an awful lot of hard work, an awful lot of discipline, and awful lot of training, an awful lot of finger exercises and practices and rehearsals and throwing away of first drafts and so on. Abraham Maslow
• Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. If all feels hopeless, if that famous 'inspiration' will not come, write. If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.   J. B. Priestly
• Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.
  Ernest Newman (1868 - 1959) Englsh music critic
• "I myself have never known a painter or known of a painter whose career was not distinguished by prodigious labor, by the sacrifice of all advantages and personal welfare to the accomplishing of the work which he had in mind. But the lot of the artist is supposed to be a jolly one; the art schools are inclined toward advising the young person just to 'let the art happen.' And biographers are prone to dwell upon the remarkable operation of genius and inspiration, rather than to attribute to their artist-subjects any such lowly procedure as that of work. Writers upon art are permitted to indulge themselves in a romanticism and, sometimes, a want of hard discipline that would spell death to art itself." - Ben Shahn in his book: The Shape of Content, Harvard University Press, 1957

Unclassified

•  That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense; there is no such thing. It is a mere matter of craftsmanship. William Morris
• What has kept you inspired as an artist? "A fear of boredom. Just a mortal fear of boredom."
  Eric Fischl (1948-), American painter. Interviewed by the Arizona Republic, April 9, 2005, p. 2.
• "For make no mistake about it, work for an artist is a highly conscious, rational process at the end of which the work of art emerges as mastered reality — not at all a state of intoxicated inspiration."
  Ernst Fischer (contemporary), British [?]. The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach.
• When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.  Sigmund Freud
• Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.  Vincent Van Gogh
• Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.  Ella Fitzgerald
• Perpetual inspiration is as necessary to the life of goodness, holiness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to animal life.  Andrew Bonar Law
• True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.   George Gershwin
• Marry Ann and at the end of a week you’ll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.   George Bernard Shaw 
• It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.    Edmund Burke
• Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.  John Updike
• If you can’t find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks—but never three.  Robert Motherwell
• With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that [the books] have a life of their own, quite apart from me.    Madeleine L’Engle, “Collaborating with Inspiration”
• A book comes and says, “Write me.” My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate. Madeleine L’Engle, “Collaborating with Inspiration”
• I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic. Winston Churchill
• I have inspiration and feelings of being alive most every day I live. I call them part of the joy of living, and they are there for all of us.  Judy Collins
• Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.  Ned Rorem 
• There is new strength, repose of mind, and inspiration in fresh apparel.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox 
• We must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration . . .  Mary Caroline Richards
• When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best --that is inspiration.  Robert Bresson
• Inspiration should not be contemplated but tasted.
• Allow me to say that Father Bach has been a strong inspiration to me, and that many a print reached definite form in my mind while I was listening to the lucid, logical language he speaks. Maurits Cornelius Escher (1898-1972), Dutch graphic artist.    Artlex   
• In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same - we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express. Julia Cameron, The Artists Way
• Moments of clear inspiration require that we move into them on faith. We can practice these small steps daily. Julia Cameron, The Artists Way
• Some people find it easier to picture the stream of inspiration as being like radio waves of all sorts being broadcast at all times. With practice, we learn to hear the desired frequency on request. We tune in to the frequency we want. Like a parent, we learn to hear the voices of our current brainchild among the other children's voices. Julia Cameron, The Artists Way
• Once we hear the voice of inspiration, accept it and act on it, another energy is activated - invisible collaboration moves to support us. Useless ideas and resources start showing up in our life. The details start to be taken care of. All that we have created that stands between us and our freedom will also come up to be healed.  Nick Williams
• Learning how to manifest wealth would teach you nothing; understanding that all things flow to you as an extension of your Being is to understand everything. Tom Carpenter, Dialogue on Awakening
• After thirty years, I still find myself puzzled by this thing called "inspiration." Why does the energy flow from unseen, bountiful sources one day, then dry up the next? article, Writing and Inspiration. Jay Parini. The Writer, April 1999 v112 i4 p7(1)
• For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. Ion  By Plato
• the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing Ion  By Plato

• [After previous investigations of a problem] . . . in all directions . . . happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration. So far as I am concerned they have never come to me when my mind is fatigued or when I was at my working table. [Helmholtz got his inspirations when rested -- often in the morning.]  Helmholz

• Gerard M.Blijdenstijn on Inspiration an artists various comments about inspiration. It is remarkable that when ideas come in this way they carry conviction with them, and dispose without a struggle ideas which previously seemed not unsatisfactory.  Sir Thomson 

• You must act as if it is impossible to fail. Ashanti Proverb

• Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.  Robert Lewis Stevenson

• Inspiration follows aspiration.  Rabindranath Tagore

• I think I'd like to be inspirational to anyone who has a dream, anyone who wants to make more of their life than maybe what is set out in front of them. And you can!  Melissa Etheridge

• Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.  Ella Fitzgerald

• I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse. Beryl Markham

• The artist must raise the cup of his vision aloft to the gods in the high hope that they will pour into it the sweet mellow wine of inspiration. Paul Brunton

•  

• I would say that the surest measure of a man's or a woman's maturity is the harmony, style, joy, and dignity he creates in his marriage, and the pleasure and inspiration he provides for his spouse. Benjamin McLane Spock

• Perpetual inspiration is as necessary to the life of goodness, holiness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to animal life. Andrew Bonar Law

• Listen to the voices.  William Faulkner

• Confidence imparts a wonderful inspiration to its possessor. John Milton

•   We should get into the habit of reading inspirational books, looking at inspirational pictures, hearing inspirational music, associating with inspirational friends. Alfred A. Montapert

• History informs us of past mistakes from which we can learn without repeating them. It also inspires us and gives confidence and hope bred of victories already won. William Hastie (1904-1976) born on Nov 17 US judge, first black Federal Appeals judge, 1949; governor, Virgin Islands, 1946-49

• The minute a person whose word means a great deal to others dares to take the openhearted and courageous way, many others follows.  Marian Anderson

•  "inspiration of genius" is "a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being."  Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

• The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru.  Nabokov's  The Paris Review, 1967

• When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline.  Shelley, Defence of Poetry

•  

• I listen to the voices, and when I’ve put down what the voices say, it’s right. I don’t always like what they say, but I don’t try to change it.  William Faulkner

• ‘You cannot write a poem by wanting to write a poem, but only by becoming an instrument, and that means not being knotted up to a purpose, but open to any accidental and fortuitous event’ May Sarton

•  

•  The poet is literally out of his senses - in exchange, all comes about within him. He is, to the letter, subject and object at the same time, soul and universe. Novalis, Cited in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, by Jacques Maritain

• To believe your own thought . . . - that is genius. . . . A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. . . . Great works of art . . . teach us to abide our spontaneous impression. . . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.  R W Emerson

• Creative imagination . . . is the faculty through which 'hunches' and 'inspirations' are received. Hill, Think and Grow Rich

• The analogy between artistic creation and childbirth is ancient . . . the exploration of artistic creativity as the psychic equivalent of procreation has been advanced in our time by Melanie Klein. Simon Stuart, New Phoenix Wings.

• The creative person, in the inspirational phase of the creative furor . . . is all there, totally immersed, fascinated, absorbed in the present, in the current situation . . . utterly lost in the present . . . Little wonder that this shaking experience has so often been considered to be super-human, supernatural. Abraham Maslow 

• For long works, however, inspiration usually gives only the skeleton and general hints as to how it is to be filled in. The writing and rewriting of almost every bar of Beethoven’s works will give an idea of the extreme labour involved . . . The mood induces concentration, which focuses the mind on the conception and it attracts ideas suitable to the expression of the conception . . . The idea when it comes suddenly into the mind with the glow of inspiration [a different metaphor] must be noted down before it fades or is lost. Rosamund Harding , The Anatomy of Inspiration

• The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakes to transitory brightness; this power arises from within. Shelley

• I am amazed at this wonderful dynamo in the mind that can create a novel from a single image." He added: "In fact I am wondering now whether I should admit to you that I have no idea where this novel is going at all. I think if you were making a skeleton you’d want to make sure you had certain bones. I think I’ve got the main bones.  John Fowles, newspaper interview

• Cezanne sees a tree. He sees it in a way no else has ever seen it . . . it is vision that is now not tree but Tree . . . Something is born [conceived?], comes into being, something that did not exist before — which is as good a definition of creativity as you can get.   Rollo May, psychologist, The Courage to Create 

• All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stand almost complete and finished in my mind, so I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. . . For this reason, the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.  Mozart

•  

• There has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something . . . That chance remark was enough for my imagination. I was able to make up an excellent story. Agatha Christie, in her autobiography

• One must set oneself to watch for and cultivate certain fragile moods of the heart. Such moods come to most people’s lives at different times, often casually and unexpected . . . and being uncultivated are thrust aside and much of their value lost . . . it is necessary that one should keep all one’s mind upon it and recognize it as an important messenger and listen to its message; one should ponder long and deeply . . . They are generally of momentary duration and should be recognised at their real worth and their inner essence consciously extracted, for truly these moments can be turned to high account. Paul Brunton — The Quest for the Overself

•  The inspiration which presents a business man with a prophetic vision of what he is to achieve . . . will leave a lingering, exalting influence that will help him to carry the work through right from its beginning . . . It fixes a certain aim or goal before the eyes during the first intoxicating moments of self-absorption . . . carries with it the inspiring sense, the positive certainty of the success or rightness towards which it is leading him. Paul Brunton in In Search of the Overself

• Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans -- that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamt would come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic and power within it.  Goethe

• I am amazed at this wonderful dynamo in the mind that can create a novel from a single image. You should give yourself to your imagination. John Fowles 

• I keep listening in a sort of inner silence until something clicks and I feel a right answer. Conrad Hilton, hotelier, Be My Guest 

• To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius . . . A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages . . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with mastery good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Inspiration comes from the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven.   Joseph Conrad

• You can not deny the reality of your inspiration being dampened. Edwin Rutsch, "Joan was all excited about doing an article, .she was criticized..  all the air went out of the inspiration  like a balloon." if other people get excited about it then you get more inspiration. -We came to this comment because Joan was getting burned out at work. she went and talked about it at work ,,, it was a waste of my breath. I think is was better because last year I felt bad for a month... I now feel better.

• When I'm inspired, I get excited because I can't wait to see what I'll come up with next.  Dolly Parton

• Listen and be led.  L. M. Heroux

• I shut my eyes in order to see. Paul Gauguin

• Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong. Ella Fitzgerald

• Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers kids show) interviewed by Terry Gross, He was doing a live TV show. One of the movies they were playing broke so he picked up a tiger puppet and started talking with it. This started his Mr. Rogers show. He said about this incident.  "Necessity there, is the mother of that invention, it hadn't been planned" and "and so much that is spontaneous can be truly, inspiring."   "All that I have done that is helpful and good, has been inspired"
• Look sharply after your thoughts, They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen in your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination . . . Apparently it is not good if the intellect examines too closely the ideas pouring in at the gates. Regarded in isolation, an idea may seem quite insignificant and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea which follows it; perhaps in certain collocation with other ideas which may seem equally absurd it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link . . . In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. Your critics . . . are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators . . . You reject too soon and discriminate too severely." ( Johann Schiller, quoted by John Adair — Effective Decision Maker).

• We must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration . . . Mary Caroline Richards ( - ____) US poet, potter
  In "Words of Women Quotations for Success," by Power Dynamics Publishing, 1997.

• "It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters."  Stephen King

•   Inspiration kicks open the doors of the mind and says. "I'm here!" Edwin Rutsch

• Business

•   “My message in this book, as you have guessed by now, is that successful business strategies result not from rigorous analysis but from a particular state of mind. In what I call the mind of
  the strategist, insight  and a consequent drive for achievement, often amounting to a sense of mission, fuel a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational . . . Great strategies, like great works of art and great scientific discoveries, call for technical mastery in working out but originate in insights that are beyond the reach of conscious analysis.” “The Mind of the Strategist”, business consultant Kenichi Ohmae

• “The inspiration which presents a business man with a prophetic vision of what he is
  to achieve . . . will leave a lingering, exalting influence that will help him to carry the work through right from its beginning . . . It fixes a certain aim or goal before the eyes during the first intoxicating moments of self-absorption . . . carries with it the inspiring sense, the positive certainty of the success or rightness towards which it is leading him”.  Paul Brunton  "In Search of the Overself"

• To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists. Arnold Bennett

• The inspiration of the almighty gives man understanding. Bible

• When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration. Robert Bresson

• Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief... Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol -- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight. William S. Burroughs

• Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study. William Congreve

• 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. William Feather

• Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant, there is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.  Johann Gottfried Von Herder

• An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.
   Source Unknown

• Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

• The state of exile is the state in which the artist is most open to inspiration of all kinds. Conductor James Conlon, SF Chronicle, 6-9-2006

• Suddenly, with a roar like that of waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my mind, I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider surrounded by waves of light.  (Gopi Krishna 1974, 2)

• It was as if the houses, doors, temple, and all other things vanished altogether, as if there was nothing everywhere! And what I saw was a boundless infinite Conscious Sea of light! ... a Continuous Succession of Effulgent Waves coming forward, raging and storming ... and lost all sense of consciousness." (Saradananda [1911-16] 1978, 163)

• The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens on him like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt, and lives by the incontestable proverb, 'God helps them that help themselves.' He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity. Raymond Queneau

• Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery. Raymond Queneau