Quotes about Inspiration

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose.

But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new Hedonism--that is what our century wants.

Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?

In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun, And drank the morning air.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.