Plato Quotes

for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.

The artist must raise the cup of his vision aloft to the gods in the high hope that they will pour into it the sweet mellow wine of inspiration.

I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.

The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just direction traffic.

I really feel like sometimes I'll write these songs, and I'll just think, 'You know that couldn't have come from me alone.' I believe that God inspires us. I believe that He gives us gifts and talents, and it's up to us to develop them and choose what we do with them.

I'm not a sports person, but every now and then, I incorporate sports in my rhymes because I'm always grabbing from certain things and getting inspired by something whether I'm totally involved in it or not.

It has always been my belief that creation, the making of 'art' in any medium or combination of mediums, is a holy act.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

If you want to write a novel, it's the Divine mind wanting to express.

[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.