Quote of the Day (Samuel Butler, on ‘True Inspiration’)

“Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.”—English novelist and critic Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Samuel Butler's Note-Books, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1952)

Quote of the Day (James Allen, on How a Person Can Become ‘The Rightful Master of Himself’)

“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”— English philosophical writer and editor James Allen (1864-1912), As a Man Thinketh (1903)

Thanks to my friend Holly for this inspirational quote.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Albert Schweitzer, on Those Who Rekindle Our Inner Light)

“As a rule there are in everyone all sorts of good ideas, ready like tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches it successfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from outside, i.e. from some other person. Often, too, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by some experience we go through with a fellow man. Thus we have each of us cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flames within us.”— Nobel Peace Prize-winning German-French theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, translated by C. T. Campion (1924)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Two Towers,’ With One of My Favorite Inspirational Scenes)

Frodo [played by Elijah Wood]: “I can't do this, Sam.”

Sam [played by Sean Astin]: “I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Frodo: “What are we holding onto, Sam?”

Sam: “That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.”—The Two Towers [Part Two of The Lord of the Rings] (2002), screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, directed by Peter Jackson

Quote of the Day (Poet Billy Collins, on Inspiration)

“In 19th-century English poetry, inspiration became a kind of pathology. There were metaphors for inspiration like flames, sparks and fountains. The trouble with the word inspiration in this context is that it suggests passivity—writers are people who write, but if you fall prey to this theory of inspiration, you're not acting, you're waiting….Waiting for inspiration is a way of ennobling procrastination. The trail of poets that has preceded you and affected your writing, those are my inspirations.  You’re never alone when you write. Your page is lit by the candles of the past.”—Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, “Soapbox: The Columnists—WSJ. Asks Five Luminaries To Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Inspiration,” WSJ., June/July 2023

The photo of Billy Collins accompanying this post was taken May 13, 2007, by Marcelo Noah.

Quote of the Day (Poet Robert Francis, on ‘Who Comes As Light’)

“Who comes as light
Need never wait outside.
Who brings the day
Always has right of way

“To enter here,
Has leave to pass
Instant as light through glass.”—American poet Robert Francis (1901-1987), “Who Comes As Light,” in Collected Poems 1936-1976 (1976)

I took the photo accompanying this post 14 years ago this month in a park in Montclair, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Eric Idle, on Why ‘Hard Work is the Only Recipe for Success’)

“Hard work is the only recipe for success. My Cambridge comedy club, The Footlights, had a motto: Ars est Celare artem, the art is in concealing the art—whilst the RAF motto was Per ardua ad astrem: through hard work to the stars. I think of writing as like fishing: if you’re not at the riverbank first thing in the morning you’re not going to catch a fish. What size of fish you haul out is a different matter. The river of the unconscious is a wonderful and devious companion.”— Monty Python member Eric Idle quoted in Alex Bleth, “Eric Idle on Not Taking Yourself Seriously,” part of story “Sane Advice for Crazy Times,” Esquire, October 2018

(Photo of Eric Idle was taken at a meet-and-greet after his show at the Paramount Theatre in Rutland, Vermont, Oct. 3, 2003, by VTscapes - Tom E. Canavan.)

Quote of the Day (Filmmaker Noah Baumbach, on His Sources of Inspiration)

“I grew up in Brooklyn. At some point, walking out of a subway up to the street, to me, felt like something I wanted to put in a movie. I love the idea of rising out of the earth — something about the way the emotion and the imagery come together for me. Other times, there might be something that feels like fodder for a scene. With [‘The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)’ from 2017], I had been spending a lot of time in hospitals [his father, the novelist Jonathan Baumbach, died in March] and was thinking of a doctor going on vacation when you need them most, or the nurses switching over and you don't like the new nurse. That kind of thing can be incredibly frustrating, but it feels alive in some way, like a wire of electricity you can use to activate something else.”—Filmmaker Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), quoted in Reggie Ugwu, “A Director’s Cinematic Confessions,” The New York Times, Dec. 1, 2019

Quote of the Day (Stephen R. Covey, on ‘Your Deepest Internal Thoughts and Desires’)

“Listen to your deepest internal thoughts and desires, for in your heart are the most meaningful issues of your life.” —Businessman, educator, and public speaker Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012), Everyday Greatness: Inspiration for a Meaningful Life (2009)

Quote of the Day (Percy Bysshe Shelley, on Inspiration)

“[W]hen composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), “A Defence of Poetry,” in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, Showing Why He Never Had Writer’s Block)

“There are those who...think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till—inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting. If the man whose business it is to write has eaten too many good things, or has drunk too much, or smoked too many cigars—as men who write sometimes will do—then his condition may be unfavourable for work; but so will be the condition of a shoemaker who has been similarly imprudent....I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler’s wax much more than the inspiration.”--Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1882)

Quote of the Day (Christian Wiman, on Inspiration and Grace)

“Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often, anomalous. A poem can leave its maker at once more deeply seized by existence and, in a profound way, alienated from it, for as the act of making ends, as the world that seemed to overbrim its boundaries becomes, once more, merely the world, it can be very difficult to retain any faith at all in that original moment of inspiration.”-- Christian Wiman, “My Bright Abyss,” The American Scholar, Winter 2009

(In this vivid and spiritually restless essay, Wiman—editor of Poetry Magazine—takes issue with the notion of “returning to the faith of your childhood,” noting that this is impossible—if you think you’ve done so, you either haven’t lived or have “denied the reality of your life.” At the same time, he holds out hope for “radical change” that can transform us “right until the last breath.”

You know what really kills me? That Jesse Ventura interview in which he said, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.” Somehow, I think, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were a lot stronger than that former professional wrestler could ever hope to be. Wiman shows how faith, far from being a “crutch,” poses one test after another, such that “I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond.”

If you want to read a 21st century counterpart to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reflection “Experience”—one that takes full account of the tragedies of life, but with a provisional openness to grace—then turn to this unusually thoughtful meditation.)