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
“Let us rather submit with firmness to His almighty will, in the full conviction that it will prove for our good, as he does nothing without a cause.”
— 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.

7 verified voices in Literature & poetry · 7 shown here, a fresh sample each day

“Enough of science and of art; / Close up these barren leaves; / Come forth, and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives.”
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) (1798)
Literature & poetry Attention & seeing Nature Stillness & rest
“My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk.”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1820)
Literature & poetry Imagination Stillness & rest
“I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”
— William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) (1800)
Literature & poetry Creativity Stillness & rest
“I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour,—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1817)
Literature & poetry Attention & seeing Joy & delight Stillness & rest
“You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1862)
Literature & poetry Nature Stillness & rest
“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
“The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.”
— Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (1882)
Literature & poetry Gratitude Stillness & rest
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.