We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides:
But tasks, in hours of insight willed,
May be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

--Matthew Arnold

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Great ideas originate in the muscles

--Thomas A. Edison

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

If someone were to tell me that it lay in my power to write a novel explaining every social question from a particular viewpoint that I believed to be the correct one, I still wouldn't spend two hours on it. But if I were told that what I am writing will be read in twenty years time by the children of today, and that those children will laugh, weep, and learn to love life as they read, why then I would devote the whole of my life and energy to it.

--Leo Tolstoy
quoted by Philip Yancey in Christian Century, 1982

Christ was himself but one and lived and died but once; but the Holy Ghost makes of every Christian another Christ, an AfterChrist; lives a million lives in every age...

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Action is forever.

--Dallas Willard

They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.

--Georges Seurat

To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in a hour.

--William Blake

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.

--Victor Frankl

In a picture, I want to say something comforting--as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize.

--Vincent Van Gogh
The Complete Letters

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror . . .

--Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies
translated by Stephen Mitchell

Give up your good Christian life and follow Christ.

--Garrison Keilor

For nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God, than friendship for the friends of God.

--Simone Veil
Waiting for God

Man is fully alive only when he experiences, at least to some extent, that he is really spontaneously dedicating himself, in all truth, to the real purpose of his own personal existence. In other words, man is alive not only when he exists, not only when he exists and acts, not only when he exists and acts as man (that is to say freely), but above all when he is conscious of the reality and inviolability of his own freedom, and aware at the same time of his capacity to consecrate that freedom entirely to the purpose for which it was given him.

--Thomas Merton
The New Man

It is the highest of the arts to affect the quality of a day.

--Thoreau
Thanks Heartbeat

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The goal of our instruction is love, from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere heart.

--St. Paul to Timothy

Money often costs too much

--Emerson

Truth divorced from experience will always dwell in the realms of doubt.

--Henry Drause

Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones favor all manner of unseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can--begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

--Goethe