Muse Quotes - Page 15

• I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

  Jackie DeShannon

  Want, Painting, Bigs

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• Most bands have a sound that they're already identified with, so for the producer it becomes a process of helping them find their muse in the studio to make a record that will not only satisfy them artistically, but will also do something in the marketplace.

  Jerry Harrison

  Sound, Band, Records

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• Two goddesses now must Cyprus adore; The Muses are ten, and the Graces are four; Stella's wit is so charming, so sweet her fair face, She shines a new Venus, a Muse, and a Grace.

  Callimachus

  Sweet, Two, Shining

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• Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.

  Matthew Arnold

  Yellow, Looks, Gallery

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.179, Delphi Classics

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• Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.

  Jonathan Swift

  Writing, Light, Rising

  'On Poetry' (1733) l. 85

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• I could not but smile to think in what out-of-the-way corners genius produces her bantlings! And the Muses, those capricious dames, who, forsooth, so often refuse to visit palaces, and deny a single smile to votaries in splendid studies, and gilded drawing-rooms--what holes and burrows will they frequent to lavish their favors on some ragged disciple!

  Washington Irving

  Thinking, Drawing, Dames

  Washington Irving, Charles Neider (1998). “The Complete Tales of Washington Irving”, p.275, Da Capo Press

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• Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless muse; Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life.

  John Milton

  Sports, Thinking, Hair

  'Lycidas' (1638) l. 64

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• So I fancy my Muse says, when I wish to die, Oh no, Oh no, we are not yet friends enough, And Virtue also says: We are not yet friends enough.

  Stevie Smith

  Wish To Die, Fancy, Virtue

  Stevie Smith (1969). “The best beast: poems”

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• Deep in the secret chambers of my heart I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch I bear it nobly as I live my part.

  Claude McKay

  Hate, Heart, Long

  Claude McKay, William Maxwell (2004). “Complete Poems”, p.162, University of Illinois Press

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• Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.

  Camille Paglia

  Giving, Erotic, Energy

  "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinso". Book by Camille Paglia, 1990.

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• There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

  Walter Benjamin

  Philosophy, Translations

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Unless you can muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed you; Unless you can love, as the angels may, With the breadth of heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast, Through behoving and unbehoving; Unless you can die when the dream is past — Oh, never call it loving!

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Dream, Angel, Past

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1992). “Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems”, p.23, Courier Corporation

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• I love him (Muse) too much, and you can't hurt someone that you love that much . . . unless you're family.

  Jack White

  Hurt, I Love Him, Too Much

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• I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Ideas, World, Agnostic

  "The Melting - Pot Revisited: Twenty Well - Known Americans of Polish Background". Book by Olgierd Budrewicz, 1977.

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• Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen cup intoxicate you. But especially preserve the chastity of your soul from the dangers you may incur, by a conversation with muses no better than harlots.

  Cotton Mather

  Reading, Soul, Cups

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• My idea of storytelling is - I wouldn't say it's religious but I would say it's spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn't do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, 'Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.' And he said, 'Visions come to prepared spirits.' The way Billy Wilder put it was 'The muse has to know where to find you.'

  David Milch

  Spiritual, Religious, Sleep

  "The Misfit". Interview with Mark Singer, www.newyorker.com. February 14, 2005.

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• I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Differences, Age, Ugly

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2014). “The Heart of Emerson's Journals”, p.317, Courier Corporation

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• Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.

  Tom Robbins

  Queens, Christianity, Goddess

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Jitterbug Perfume”, p.62, Bantam

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• January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.

  Isabel Allende

  Book, Inspiration, Writing

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• The virtues, like the Muses, are always seen in groups. A good principle was never found solitary in any breast.

  Gautama Buddha

  Inspiring, Wise, Buddhist

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• Here will I live in the rainy season, here in the autumn and in the summer: thus muses the fool. He realizes not the danger (of death).

  Gautama Buddha

  Death, Summer, Autumn

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• One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.

  Charles de Lint

  Inspiration, Growth, World

  "Memory and Dream". Book by Charles de Lint, 1994.

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• Writing is self-reinforcing. Don't make a fetish out of it, and don't surrender to the myth of the garret, or the myth of the chained muse. It's like playing the guitar, or practicing taekwondo, or having sex. The more you do, the better you get. The better you get, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you want to do.

  Jay Lake

  Sex, Writing, Guitar

  Interview with Patrick Wolohan, www.sfsignal.com. August 24, 2009.

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• I am impressed by the way Annie Kevans captured the different types of beauties that have been my inspiration and my muses from my grandmother to artists like David Bowie and Boy George.

  Jean Paul Gaultier

  Inspiration, Grandmother, Artist

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• I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

  Michel Leiris

  Writing, Doe, Steel

  Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

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