Genius is one percent Inspirational, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspirational, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for Inspirational's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

You can't wait for Inspirational. You have to go after it with a club.

This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.

The two lovers walked among the willow trees, and the oneness of each was a language speaking of the oneness of both; and an ear listening in silence to the Inspirational of love; and a seeing eye seeing the glory of happiness. "Astarte has brought back our souls to this life so that the delights of love and the glory of youth might not be forbidden us, my beloved.

Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.

The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.

"If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.

Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze's chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.

For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

You are always new. THe last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass'd my window home yesterday, I was fill'd with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time...Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

"I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations

"I worry there is something broken in our generation

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

"Separation

It was the earliest demonstration of a phenomenon popularized by-and now named for-James Surowiecki's bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds. Aggregating the judgment of many consistently beats the accuracy of the average member of the group, and is often as startlingly accurate as Galton's weight-guessers.

Those who do not understand the power of collaboration always struggle for growth.

... there is no place whatever for hatred in the minds of the wise. Only an utter idiot would hate good men, and it is irrational to hate the wicked; for if vice is a species of mental disease comparable to illness in the body, since we regard those who are physically ill as wholly undeserving of hatred and deserving rather of pity, then men with minds oppressed by wickedness, a condition more dreadful than any sickness, should all the more be pitied rather than hounded.

But as such mere illustrations are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible humans solutions), therefore it may help to the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be wholly without use.

can one dispute that the wiser a person is, the more effective and content and meaning-rich they will be? I would say not. It is more difficult to define and research wisdom than it is to theorize about it. As an illustration, take two identical race cars and put two very different drivers behind the wheels; the success each driver will enjoy more often than not, is directly related to their skill level ? their proficiency. One can likewise think of a wise person as proficient at living life.