“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1817)
“I must, at any cost, have the horizon stretching out as far as the eye can see, and skies to dream about.”
— Sarah Bernhardt, Memories of My Life (1907)
“As far as the music is concerned I am exploring a virgin Brazilian forest and great are the treasures I hope to find.”
— Hector Berlioz, The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in His Letters and Memoirs (trans. Katharine F. Boult, 1903) (1832)
“Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves.”
— William Hazlitt, The Round Table (1817)
“In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt.”
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)
“"The proper stuff of fiction" does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“All this is to say there are things one senses in the future and that really come about.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
“But if every mechanical inventor on earth voiced his dearest wish and lived to see it worked out, the real drama of prophecy and fulfilment, as written in the imagination of the human race, would remain uncompleted.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“I am in love with the image of Tatiana, I am under the spell of Poushkin's verse, and I am drawn to compose the music as it were by some irresistible attraction. I am lost in the composition of the opera.”
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, ed. Modeste Tchaikovsky (trans. Rosa Newmarch, 1906) (1877)
“For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass.”
— William Shakespeare, Henry V (1599)
“The brain is wider than the sky, / For, put them side by side, / The one the other will include / With ease, and you beside.”
— Emily Dickinson, Poems by Emily Dickinson (ed. Todd & Higginson) (1896)
“the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.”
— Plato, The Republic
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