"I Am Not Bound To Win, But I Am Bound To Be True. I Am Not Bound To Succeed, But I Am Bound To Live By The Light That I Have. I Must Stand With Anybody That Stands Right, And Stand With Him While He Is Right, And Part With Him When He Goes Wrong."
The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with. . . the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not been heard from since, is as silly as it is blasphemous.
My hope is to incite that feeling of inspiration in as many other people as possible. To receive and pass along that baton to anyone willing to carry it further. I guess the answer to the question would be I'm inspired by the work of those (and sometimes even the people themselves) who strive to inspire.
It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness .
"Keep Away From People Who Try To Belittle Your Ambitions. Small People Always Do That, But The Really Great Make You Feel That You, Too, Can Become Great."
Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.
Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.