Quotes about Inspiration

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Morning is when I'm awake, and there is dawn in me.

I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream, And thou meanderest forever At the bottom of my dream.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness...

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around. Nothing can be more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried.

Let him march to the music he hears.

No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles.

If you can speak what you will never hear,—if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things