Quotes about Inspiration

The presence of passion within you is the greatest gift you can receive. Treat it as a miracle.

So many people grew up with challenges, as I did. There weren't always happy things happening to me or around me. But when you look at the core of goodness within yourself - at the optimism and hope - you realize it comes from the environment you grew up in.

I never struggle for motivation, that's for sure. Motivation is something that burns within.

The greatest artist has no conception which a single block of white marble does not potentially contain within its mass, but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

A home without books is a body without soul.

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

I found the purpose of my existence, and also the purpose of my circumstance. There's a purpose for why you're in the fire. If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart!

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

So when it came to role models, I looked at presidents' wives. Of course, you're talking about a farm girl who stood in the fields, dreaming, years ago, wishing she was that kind of person. But if I had been that kind of person, do you think I could sing with the emotions I do? You sing with those emotions because you've had pain in your heart.