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.

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

“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
“And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! / And he is no mean preacher; / Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher.”
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) (1798)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Nature
“The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.”
— Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (1855)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Love & friendship
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Craft & discipline
“But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1862)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Craft & discipline
“at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakspeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1817)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Craft & discipline Courage
“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
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars”
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892 edition) (1892)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Nature
“It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Craft & discipline
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1870)
Literature & poetry Beauty Wonder & awe
“Why, who makes much of a miracle? / As to me I know of nothing else but miracles”
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892 edition) (1892)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Gratitude
“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1817)
Literature & poetry Wonder & awe Joy & delight
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.