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.

9 verified voices in Visual arts · 9 shown here, a fresh sample each day

“It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual, — that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood”
— John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume 1 (1843)
Visual arts Beauty Attention & seeing Stillness & rest
“Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offences, and they cannot hurt your feelings.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Solace & consolation Courage Stillness & rest
“You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Courage Stillness & rest
“I don’t feel as much need to amuse myself, I’m less at the mercy of my passions and I can work more calmly, I could be alone without being bored. I came out of it feeling a little older, but no sadder.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
Visual arts Solace & consolation Stillness & rest
“It was extraordinarily beautiful this morning, and it did me good to go for a long walk, for with all the drawing and the lithographs I’d hardly been out of doors this week.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
Visual arts Joy & delight Nature Stillness & rest
“The senses are of the earth; Reason, stands apart in contemplation.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Stillness & rest Truth & honesty
“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Nature Time & mortality Stillness & rest
“Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1882)
Visual arts Beauty Attention & seeing Stillness & rest
“Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present.”
— Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Richter translation)
Visual arts Gratitude Time & mortality 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.