Quotes about Inspiration

Still, he never felt that the sermons he wrote at the cottage were good. By the time he got back to Washington to preach them, they no longer excited him. They seemed cold, lifeless. This was probably because Peter's best sermons rose out of the soil of emotion in his own heart. That emotion had to be a present, valid reality. He could not conjure it up.

We don't have to accept blandness in life. God, who is the author of creativity, is ready to make a dull life adventuresome the moment we allow his Holy Spirit to go to work inside us.

Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.

What would Jesus do with this gift of writing, this God-given love of writing? What would He write?

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.

If you don't find a leader, perhaps it is because you were meant to lead.

I believe in you. I believe that you are the people that will make the difference. I believe that we cannot conquer darkness with darkness. We cannot conquer evil with evil, we must fight darkness with light. We must not tear down, but buildup.

He was leading those who risked their lives over that bridge in Selma, not Janice Joplin, Columbia University, or a labor union. It wasn't John Lennon that taught people about love and peaceful resistance — that job fell on the shoulders of a Jewish carpenter.

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I'm "passing the torch." I explain that I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much—and I'm using it to light the torches of others.

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.