Motivational Quotations

If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street. 

—Ben Nicholas

The seed of your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections (or mistakes, if you’re feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides -- valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgmental guides -- to matters you need to reconsider or develop further.”

—David Bayles and
Ted Orland

Excellent ideas come to me every moment and if instead of executing them at the very moment they are clothed with the charm imagination lends them . . . one forgets, or what is worse, one no longer finds any interest in what seemed inspiring.

—Delacroix

For make no mistake about it, work for an artist is a highly conscious, rational process at the end of which the work of art emerges as mastered reality-- not at all a state of intoxicated inspiration.

—Ernst Fischer

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

—Federico Fellini

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. 

—Frank Tibolt

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. 

—Igor Stravinsky

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. 

—Jack London

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance

—James Joyce

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."

—James Joyce

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. 

—John Updike

Some people find it easier to picture the stream of inspiration as being like radio waves of all sorts being broadcast at all times. With practice, we learn to hear the desired frequency on request. We tune in to the frequency we want.

—Julia Cameron,
The Artists Way

Don't wait for inspiration. It's a romantic notion that you wait around for that "aha!" revelation, and then work like mad to finish. The successful artist works day after day through blocks, bad habits, and distractions. There is no perfect time to begin. Begin now.

—Lee Silber

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

—Madeleine L'Engle

When that time comes, I try to be alone and silent for several hours.; I need a lot of time to rid my mind of the noise outside and to cleanse my memory of life's confusion. I light candles to summon the muses and guardian spirits. I place flowers on my desk to initiate tedium and the complete works of Pablo Neruda beneath the computer with the hope they will inspire me by osmosis. If computers can be infected with a virus there's no reason why they shouldn't be refreshed by a breath of poetry. In a secret ceremony I prepare my mind and soul to receive the first sentence in a trance, so the door may open slightly and allow me to peer through and perceive the hazy outlines of the story waiting for me. 

—'Paula' Isobel Allende

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning. 

—Peter De Vries

The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration. 

—Philip Hamerton

Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.

—Robert Collier

The artist must cultivate this mood, wait for it, and seek to stimulate it, sometimes by gazing at their paints or even brushing random patterns on the canvas . . . sparked by the artist’s encountering the brilliant colours on the palette or the inviting white roughness of the canvas . . . It is a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move. 

—Rollo May,
The Courage to Create 

I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.

—Ruth Benedict

We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood without endeavoring to meet it half way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination . . . I am glad I have not followed in the steps of some of my Russian colleagues, who have no self-confidence and are so impatient that at the least difficulty they are ready to throw up the sponge. This is why, in spite of great gifts, they accomplish so little, and that in an amateur way.

—Tchaikovsky

Inspiration is a guest who does not like to visit lazy people.

—Tchaikovsky

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

—Tom Stoppard

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

—Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One's Own

The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.

—William Arthur Ward