Quotes About Inspiration

She laughed and asked, "What if Shakespeare was just hitting keys?" "Shakespeare didn't have a typewriter," I said. "What if he was just making marks on paper? And that's how he came up with Macbeth?" "I doubt it. Maybe Measure for Measure. I could see that with Measure for Measure. Not Macbeth.

Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

Best and brightest, come away!

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

Teach me half the gladnessThat thy brain must know,Such harmonious madness,From my lips would flow,The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrateWith thine own hues all thou dost shine uponOf human thought or form.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!Bird thou never wert,That from Heaven, or near it,Pourest thy full heartIn profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

The soul of Adonais, like a star,Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,Spirit of Delight!

He is a portion of the lovelinessWhich once he made more lovely.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:What if my leaves are falling like its own!The tumult of thy mighty harmoniesWill take from both a deep, autumnal tone,Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

[T]here is a harmony In autumn, and a luster in its sky...

I arise from dreams of theeIn the first sweet sleep of night,When the winds are breathing low,And the stars are shining bright.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

Poet's food is love and fame.

Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race; they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass

I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity.

I'm... like a poet hidden In the light of thought Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.