Motivating Quotes for Writers and Artists

• “Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything.” (Horace)
• “The incurable itch of writing possesses many.” (Juvenal)
• “He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his work, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” (John Ruskin.)
• “The excellency of every art is its intensity.” (John Keats)
• “Great artists need great clients.” (Artist I.M. Pei.)
• “It seems to me that the writers who have the power of revelation are just those who, in some particular part of life, have seen or felt considerably more than the average run of intelligent beings…The great difference, intellectually speaking, between one man and another is simply the number of things they can see in a given cubic yard of the world.” (Gilbert Murray.)
• “High but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.” (Catherine Cox.)
• “I think if you’re going to write, you’re going to write and nothing will stop you.” (William Faulkner.)
• “It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.” (John Steinbeck.)
• “The essential factor of development of expertise is the accumulation of increasingly complex patterns in memory.” (Andreas Lehman.}
• “Gifts like genius, I often think, means only an infinite capacity for taking pains.” (Jane E. Hopkins)
• “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon one can never resist or understand.” (George Orwell)
• “It is through art and through art only, that we realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” (Oscar Wilde)
• “If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman I know I am making art.” (Henry Moore.)
• “The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade…The work of his life is two-fold only; to see, to feel.” (John Ruskin.)
• “I am just a man in the position of waiting to see what the imagination is going to do next.”(Saul Bellow.)

© 2025 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

or

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighting-to-win-samurai-techniques-for-your-work-and-life-david-rogers/1119303640?ean=2940149174379

Order Waging Business Warfare: Lessons From the Military Masters in Achieving Competitive Superiority

or

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waging-business-warfare-lessons-from-the-military-masters-in-achieving-competetive-superiority-revised-edition-david-rogers/1119079991?ean=2940149284030

Follow my blog with Bloglovin