Voices of the Muses

The world's great painters, poets, composers and thinkers wrote constantly about how to live — in letters, journals and the works themselves. This is that wisdom, gathered and verified: a companion for your day, and a doorway into the arts they made.

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Today's voice
“My heart beats with joy at the thought of the happy day when I shall once more see and embrace you.”
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vol. 1 (trans. Lady Grace Wallace, 1865) (1778)
Composer, 1756–1791
What this is, and how to use it

Not a quote site. A daily practice, and a door.

1

Find a voice for your day

Filter by what you're living through — courage, solace, gratitude, stillness — and hear how someone who lived by their art faced the same thing. Every quote is real: traced to the letter, page or verse it was actually written in, never internet folklore.

2

Don't just read — sit with it

Take one voice, not twenty. Read it slowly, twice. Ask what it would change about your afternoon if it were true. That single unhurried minute is the smallest version of every practice ImagineArts teaches.

3

Follow the voice to its art

Each voice is a door: Van Gogh's letters lead to really looking, Seneca leads to the examined life, the Psalms lead to awe. When a voice grabs you, start free and learn the practice behind it.

15 verified voices in Literature & poetry · 12 shown here, a fresh sample each day

“A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist, nor that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Community Transcendence
“A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1869)
Literature & poetry Community Transcendence
“The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else's,—as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Community Transcendence
“The destiny of art in our time is to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for men consists in being united together”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Meaning & purpose Hope Community
“whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Creativity Community
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. / I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892 edition) (1892)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Stillness & rest Community
“Blessed are those who chat easily with their neighbours about their sport or their buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk of carpenters and gardeners.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
Literature & poetry Joy & delight Community
“And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation, will educate people to union, will show them, not by reason but by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds set by life.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Joy & delight Community Transcendence
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
Literature & poetry Truth & honesty Community
“Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Community
“Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Creativity Community
“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
— Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (1855)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Community
The Salon library

This is today’s sample of twelve. The whole collection is in the Salon.

Salon members read all 746 English quotes and the Afrikaans collection too, with every filter, the plain-words notes from A Year with the Muses, the quotes they save, and a private journal for the lines that stay with them.

Join the SalonAlready a member? Open the library →

Every quote in this collection was verified against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions. Start free to bring these voices into your daily practice.