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.

26 verified voices in Visual arts · 12 shown here, a fresh sample each day

“If one has no horse, one is one’s own horse — a lot of people do that here.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1883)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Courage
“Heaps of people don’t copy. Heaps of others do copy — for me, I set myself to it by chance, and I find that it teaches and above all sometimes consoles.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1889)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Solace & consolation Play
“I myself am very far from satisfied with this but, well, getting better must come through doing it and through trying.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Hope
“[I]t seemed that like me, you suffered to see your youth going up in — smoke — but if it comes back and appears in what we do, there’s nothing lost, and the power to work is a second youth.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Hope Time & mortality
“You should begin with a broom and finish with a needle.”
— Eugène Delacroix, Sayings quoted in P.G. Konody, 'Delacroix' (Masterpieces in Colour)
Visual arts Craft & discipline
“One knows what one has to do; there’s an abundance of subjects and Carlyle rightly says, Blessed is he who has found his work.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Meaning & purpose Gratitude
“Just as iron rusts unless it is used, and water putrifies or, in cold, turns to ice, so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Attention & seeing Craft & discipline
“It is no easier, I’m convinced, to make a good painting than to find a diamond or a pearl; it requires effort, and you stake your life as a dealer or an artist on it.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Courage
“Cameos are not made to be put into painting; everything ought to keep its proper place.”
— Eugène Delacroix, Sayings quoted in P.G. Konody, 'Delacroix' (Masterpieces in Colour)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Truth & honesty
“Art is jealous; she won’t allow illness to be placed above her. So I’ll let her have her way.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Courage
“Wisdom is the daughter of experience.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Craft & discipline Truth & honesty
“Seemingly there’s nothing simpler than painting peasants or rag-pickers and other labourers but — no subjects in painting are as difficult as those everyday figures!”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1885)
Visual arts Attention & seeing Craft & discipline Truth & honesty
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.