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.

8 verified voices in Literature & poetry · 8 shown here, a fresh sample each day

“A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean, and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man”
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) (1798)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Nature Transcendence
“We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
Literature & poetry Imagination 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
“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
“it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Community Transcendence
“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
“Art is a spiritual organ of human life which cannot be destroyed”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
Literature & poetry Hope Transcendence
“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
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.