Quotes about Inspiration

With just the 'Carmagnole' to sing he will only overthrow Louis XVI; but give him the 'Marseillaise' and he will liberate the world.

Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign—the starry eye.

That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to which I have returned!

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Love begins with a metaphor. Love begins at a point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us

The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.

The genius of lyric poetry is the genius of inexperience.

But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.