John Ruskin Quotes

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.

I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.

It wasn't until I saw 'Rocky' that I realized movies could affect people beyond mere entertainment.

Words have power. The power to soothe. The power to skewer someone through the heart. The power to render someone speechless.

Then it would not be so strong a sense. If it failed to produce equal exertion, it could not be an equal conviction.

We are capable of creating miracles ourselves and the greatest miracle is to create a masterpiece of joy out of your life with no excuses. The thing I focus on is going straight to heart. I go to mine first because if I don't feel it, you're not going to feel it. I take a deep breath and remind myself that before I give it to you I have to give it to myself.

Inspiration is that state in which mind and heart are connected.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

People will not lend you a hand until you first touch their hearts.

You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.

Songs have some kind of structure that connects with people's hearts.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

The heart of change is in the emotions.

The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.

Have faith in yourself. You people were once the Vedic Rishis. Only, you have come in different forms, that's all. I see it clear as daylight that you all have infinite power in you. Rouse that up; arise, arise - apply yourselves heart and soul, gird up your loins.

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.

Power invariably elects to go into the hands of the strong. That strength may be physical or of the heart or, if we do not fight shy of the word, of the spirit. Strength of the heart connotes soul-force. Let it be remembered that physical force is transitory, even as the body is transitory. But the power of spirit is permanent even as the spirit is everlasting.

And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it's enough. I really do because they've made me happy. And I'm only one person.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

All the kindness which a man puts out into the world works on the heart and thoughts of mankind.

A single thought has the power of a bullet: either it can destroy you or it can help you immensely.

Can you become The hope I need? Can you help me be More than it is written in my future Or past? Is there another me to find?

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.

Your hearts are mighty, your skins are whole.