Composer Inspirational Quotes

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here. [Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]

The beauty of traveling is understood along the way rather than at the end of the journey, just as the purpose of marriage isn’t about becoming Mr. and Mrs.’s, but is about the love that is expressed on a daily basis between two lovers. A journey is not made up of the destinations that we arrive at, but is composed within every step and each breath we make.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

See, the ‘small stuff’ is what makes up the larger picture of our lives. Many people are like you, young man. But their perspective is distorted. They ignore ‘small stuff,’ claiming to have an eye on the bigger picture, never understanding that the bigger picture is composed of nothing more than-are you ready?- ‘small stuff’.

Education develops the intellect; and the intellect distinguishes man from other creatures. It is education that enables man to harness nature and utilize her resources for the well-being and improvement of his life. The key for the betterment and completeness of modern living is education. But, ' Man cannot live by bread alone '. Man, after all, is also composed of intellect and soul. Therefore, education in general, and higher education in particular, must aim to provide, beyond the physical, food for the intellect and soul. That education which ignores man's intrinsic nature, and neglects his intellect and reasoning power can not be considered true education.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

So the next time you see a person with a compose face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.

One thing I've learnt through writing is this: with everything in life, you have to look down deep into your heart! That fact is true with all things! If you have Jesus inside, He will give you all you need to say, and all the actions you need to do! It's not mere imagination the things I write; they are composed from the words lit up inside of me, from my Creator, who made all things bright!

The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring. [p. 199]

A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?

You don't have to be a professional to play music. Close your eyes, take a deep breath.. And let it out. Let the violin dance, the guitar fascinate, the flute sing, the piano composes. Just. Let. It. Go.

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.

The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer, but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a correspondence bewteen the measure of individual elements and the appearance of the work as a whole.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

The greatest composer does not sit down to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

A woman can tolerate delays knowing they are not denials; she is diligent, and composed. She is not easily irritated like love; she endures all things, beans all things and can be stretched to any limit.

some of the best music was composed by Beethovan,but he was deaf,some of the best poetry of nature was written by Milton,but he was deaf.possible is always inside the impossible...

Belief is made up of the same non-substance of which we ourselves are composed. The test of any belief system, then, is the degree to which this same light is permitted to shine through.

Let my heiress have full rights, Live in my house, sing songs that I composed. Yet how slowly my strength ebbs, How the tortured breast craves air. The love of my friends, my enemies' rancor And the yellow roses in my bushy garden, And a lover's burning tenderness—all this I bestow upon you, messenger of dawn. Also the glory for which I was born, For which my star, like some whirlwind, soared And now falls. Look, its falling Prophesies your power, love and inspiration. Preserving my generous bequest, You will live long and worthily. Thus it will be. You see, I am content, Be happy, but remember me.

We are all beautiful instruments of God. He created many notes in music so that we would not be stuck playing the same song. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your journey and play on. Nobody will ever reach ultimate perfection in this lifetime, but trying to achieve it is a full-time job. Start now and don't stop. Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society, tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.

Evil is not one large entity, but a collection of countless, small depravities brought up from the muck by petty men. Many have traded the enrichment of vision for a gray fog of mediocrity--the fertile inspiration of striving and growth, for mindless stagnation and slow decay--the brave new ground of the attempt, for the timid quagmire of apathy. Many of you have traded freedom not even for a bowl of soup, but worse, for the spoken empty feelings of others who say that you deserve to have a full bowl of soup provided by someone else. Happiness, joy, accomplishment, achievement . . . are not finite commodities, to be divided up. Is a child’s laughter to be divided and allotted? No! Simply make more laughter! Every person’s life is theirs by right. An individual’s life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to their life, nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing their means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man’s throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than the individuals who compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but to any notion that strikes the fancy of the society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters. Surrendering reason to faith in unreasonable men sanctions their use of force to enslave you--to murder you. You have the power to decide how you will live your life. Those mean, unreasonable little men are but cockroaches, if you say they are. They have no power to control you but that which you grant them!

So I took up those poems with which they seemed to have taken most trouble and asked them what they meant, in order that I might at the same time learn something from them. I am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentlemen, but I must. Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could. I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? — … There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal, and Jefferson those of Buffon, so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. [Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787]

The things that most deserve our gratitude we just take for granted. Without air we cannot live for more than a minute or two. Everyday we are breathing in and breathing out, but do we ever feel grateful to the air? If we do not drink water, we cannot survive. Even our body is composed to a large extent of water.But do we give any value to water? Every morning when we open our eyes, we see the sun blessingfully offering us light and life-energy, which we badly need. But are we grateful to the sun?

All transitions are composed of an ending, a neutral zone and a new beginning

Our lives are composed of unexpected moments and unforgettable adventures.

Taming attachment,does not mean becoming cold and disinterested. On the contrary, it means learning to have a composed control over our mind through understanding

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.

A Catholic culture does not mean or imply universality. A nation or a whole civilization is of the Catholic culture not when it is entirely composed of strong believers minutely practicing their religion, nor even whit it boasts a majority of such, but when it presents a determining number of units-family institutions, individuals, inspired by and tenacious of the Catholic spirit.

I am come to warn you. I am come to impeach your happiness. It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour. You have everything, and that is composed of the nothing of others… As for me, I am but a voice. Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry. You shall hear me!

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting. Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too

Many Americans first fell in love with the poetry of the thirteenth century teacher and spiritual leader Jelalludin Rumi during the early 1990s when the unparalleled lyrical grace, philosophical brilliance, and spiritual daring of his work took modern Western readers completely by surprise. The impact of its soulful beauty and the depth of its profound humanity were so intense that they reportedly prompted numerous individuals to spontaneously compose poetry.

…When you’re in the darkness, know that the light will come. We are light and dark, sun and moon, male and female, yin and yang; life is composed of opposites, in a continuing cycle of change…. When you are in the light, don’t step back into the darkness. Live in that light, and breathe it in fully. I’ve spent so much of my life going over and over the sadness and fear of the past. But we don’t need to go there when we’re not there. When we are in the light, be here, now.

Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and don't allow limitations implanted by society tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.

The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. “… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.

There’s a huge difference between the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever. No one understands us

Life is a tagline, please compose it with your best-est knowledge.

The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

Alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was composed of a string of “if only’s” leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next until at some point, one’s final iteration of the excuse became one’s final utterance, and one expired.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

Of all the animals that fly, some are like floating flowers (butterflies), some are songbirds that are full of gulp (swallows), and some are swimming birds that also run marathons (ducks). When I compose music to be performed live in an elevator, those are my inspirations.

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

Jahan took a breath and composed herself. “When I was a little sort of girl and I would see a gentleman or a lady with good, clean clothes I would run and hide my face. But after I graduated from the Korphe School, I felt a big change in my life. I felt I was clear and clean and could go before anybody and discuss anything. And now that I am already in Skardu, I feel that anything is possible. I don’t want to be just a health worker. I want to be such a woman that I can start a hospital and be an executive, and look over all the health problems of all the women in the Braldu. I want to become a very famous woman of this area,” Jahan said, twirling the hem of her maroon silk headscarf around her finger as she peered out the window, past a soccer player sprinting through the drizzle toward a makeshift goal built of stacked stones, searching for the exact word with which to envision her future. “I want to be a… ‘Superlady’” she said, grinning defiantly, daring anyone, any man, to tell her she couldn’t. p. 313

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity.

When a person is miserable, wretched, and unhappy in himself, put him in what circumstances you please, and he is wretched still. If a person is poor, and composes his mind, and calmly submits to the providence's of God, he will feel cheerful and happy in all circumstances, if he continues to keep the commandments of God.

Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.

Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).

Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without - our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.

The question why I don't shake hand with someone,A reason is Behind;Scumbags call it Attitude but they really don't know its actually the antimatter Waqas is composed of.

Have peace in knowing, dear ones, that we are all composed of energy. Energy never dies. It is always changing and transforming.

Et j'avoue que la raison reste confondue en présence du prodige même de l'amour, de l'étrange obsession qui fait que cette même chair dont nous nous soucions si peu quand elle compose notre propre corps, nous inquiétant seulement de la laver, de la nourrir, et, s'il se peut, de l'empêcher de souffrir, puisse nous inspirer une telle passion de caresses simplement parce qu'elle est animée par une individualité différente de la nôtre, et parce qu'elle présente certains linéaments de beauté, sur lesquels, d'ailleurs, les meilleurs juges ne s'accordent pas.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament. Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences.

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them—and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.

Every object is transformed within us according to the images it evokes, the sensations that cluster around it. To be sure an object may please us for itself alone, for the pleasant feelings that a harmonious sight inspires in us; but far more often the pleasure that an object affords us does not derive from the object in itself. Our fantasy embellishes it, surrounding it, making it resplendent with images dear to us. Then we no longer see it for what it is, but animated by the images it arouses in us or by the things we associate with it. In short, what we love about the object is what we put in it of ourselves, the harmony established between it and us, the soul that it acquires only through us, a soul composed of our memories.

A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I

Some five decades later, writer Terry Sullivan was inspired by Mary’s life story to compose the popular tongue twister : She sells seashells on the seashore The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure So if she sells seashells on the seashore Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells.

Medieval scholars held on to a classical Greek theory, according to which the movements of the stars across the sky create heavenly music that permeates the entire universe. Humans enjoy physical and mental health when the inner movements of their body and soul are in harmony with the heavenly music created by the stars. Human music should therefore echo the divine melody of the cosmos, rather than reflect the ideas and caprices of flesh-and-blood composers. The most beautiful hymns, songs and tunes were usually attributed not to the genius of some human artist but to divine inspiration.

There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.

The greatest book ever composed was marked at one point unconventional. Also it was marked difficult to read, especially in its original format. Yet that book has saved countless lives including mine, and that book, I'm referring to is still saving countless lives today... Think about that when others mention flaws about your work.

Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composes in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas -- whether one is a good composer or not -- one must be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration. ("Composition with Twelve Tones")

Izima's elaborate stagings of these exotic murder scenes had their genesis through a series of processes, from inspirational idea through imagination, to intention, and then initiation. The ascendant 'i' here might well be symbolic of Izima's 'I,' or ego, as he both composes and conducts these visual compositions, the sole purpose of which is to transfix and seduce the viewer's 'eye.

Let’s face it, she’s our inspiration! The Muse as fluffball! And the inspiration of men, as well! Why else were the sagas of heroes, of their godlike strength and superhuman exploits, ever composed, if not for the admiration of women thought stupid enough to believe them? Where did five hundred years of love lyrics come from, not to mention those plaintive imploring songs, all musical whines and groans? Aimed straight at women stupid enough to find them seductive! When lovely woman stoops or bungles her way into folly, pleading her good intentions, her wish to please, and is taken advantage of, especially by somebody famous, if stupid or smart enough, she gets caught, just as in classic novels, and makes her way into the tabloids, confused and tearful, and from there straight into our hearts. We forgive you! we cry. We understand! Now do it some more!

The twenty-year-olds sob, lament the only death that could have sealed off their youth, that of the magnificent lover they invented all together, whom they invoked through their prayers and incantations on nights when species vanished, whom they brought to life through witchcraft set down in ink composed of tears, blood, sperm, great symbols traced on hardwood or warmed ceramic, this lovely villain who would have spirited them away far from their beggar fathers, who would have made them princes in golden palaces, so go the thoughts of those who are so inspired; while the others tell themselves simply that he would have made it possible for them to live. A choir, to assuage absence and impotence. Listen to the vibrant song of new sorrows. They are of a race that sings under torture; they have no understanding of laws; they have no moral sense, they are brutes; do not be mistaken.

As a result of Malory’s plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d’Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere , and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.

Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan. In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process---its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman's slate appears to be blank. "I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you," Watanabe-san said. "This is by Hokusai's daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but I think she is even better than the father.

Everything in life is one way or another created by thoughts, ideas. The thoughts can be chaotic and wild and create a lot of pain and trouble, or they can be organized to the last minute detail and make something beautiful and perfect. Your life has its structure. It is composed of things that are happening in it. All those events are reflections of your intentions. Things and occurrences are shaped according to your thoughts. Is there some confusion in your life? There is likely confusion in your mind. Are you experiencing joy, peace and beauty? Well, then the same are your wishes.

If you have to run then learn from Bolt, if you have to fight watch Muhammad Ali`s jab and grab punches, if dunking with a basketball does it for you why not pull a Vince Carter or fly in like Michael Jordan , if science and evolution tickles your fancy have you read "Evolution" by Charles Darwin? Well, Like Martin Luther king said " If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." So pickup that broom , get started and stop complaining!

Does Jesus Care? In a fit of despondency, the psalmist once bemoaned, “No one cares for my soul” (Ps. 142:4). But in the next verse he turned his gloom into a prayer, declaring to God, “You are my refuge.” The word care occurs eighty-two times in the Bible, which frequently reminds us that when “the days are weary, the long nights dreary,” our Savior cares. Frank Graeff wrote “Does Jesus Care?” in 1901, and it was set to music by the noted conductor and composer, Dr. J. Lincoln Hall (born November 4, 1866), who later called it his most inspired piece of music. The form of the hymn is unusual. Each stanza asks questions about God’s care for us in various situations, and the chorus resounds with the bolstering answer: “Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares!” NOVEMBER 4 Does Jesus care when my heart is pained Too deeply for mirth or song, As the burdens press, and the cares distress And the way grows weary and long? Does Jesus care when I’ve tried and failed To resist some temptation strong; When for my deep grief there is no relief, Though my tears flow all the night long? Does Jesus care when I’ve said “good-bye” To the dearest on earth to me, And my sad heart aches till it nearly breaks, Is it aught to Him? Does He see? Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares, His heart is touched with my grief; When the days are weary, the long nights dreary, I know my Savior cares. . . . casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. – 1 Peter 5:7

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.

The human mind is a product of nature. Resembling other forms of nature, does it follow an ancient code by adhering to universal rules of structure, time, and rhythm? Does the human mind establish through training and education its own pulse, tempo, pace, and lilt? Does reading allow us to witness the rhythm, beat, and intonation of other people’s minds? Does writing allow us to develop, monitor, and train the pulsating pulse of our own surfing mental cadence? Does reading enable us to see the groundswell of our own life refracted through a prism of other people’s storm of words? Does reading depict the upsurge of images and thoughts of a working mind, which casement frames humankind? Does writing spur us to scrutinize the indistinct pictures taken by the viewfinder submerged in our own minds? Does inspired writing draw out of us what composed material binders the structures of our multi-dimensional mind?

The next day, he read to me a freshly composed dirge in which the circumstances of his wife’s death and burial were commemorated. He read it in a voice quavering with emotion, and the hand that held the paper was trembling. When he had finished, he asked me whether the verses were worthy of the treasure that he had lost. “They are,” I said. “They may lack poetic inspiration,” he remarked, after a moment’s hesitation, “but no one can deny them sentiment—although possibly the sentiment itself prejudices the merits…” “Not in my opinion. I find the poem perfect.” “Yes, I suppose, when you consider…Well, after all, it’s just a few lines written by a sailor.” “By a sailor who happens to be also a poet.” He shrugged his shoulders, looked at the paper, and recited his composition again, but this time without quavering or trembling, emphasizing the literary qualities and bringing out the imagery and music in the verses. When he had finished, he expressed the opinion that it was the most finished of his works, and I agreed. He shook my hand and predicted a great future for me.

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett’s inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion...

Its chief covering seemed to me to be composed of large wings folded over its breast and reaching to its knees; the rest of its attire was composed of an under tunic and leggings of some thin fibrous material. It wore on its head a kind of tiara that shone with jewels, and carried in its right hand a slender staff of bright metal like polished steel. But the face! it was that which inspired my awe and my terror. It was the face of man, but yet of a type of man distinct from our known extant races. The nearest approach to it in outline and expression is the face of the sculptured sphinx—so regular in its calm, intellectual, mysterious beauty. Its colour was peculiar, more like that of the red man than any other variety of our species, and yet different from it—a richer and a softer hue, with large black eyes, deep and brilliant, and brows arched as a semicircle. The face was beardless; but a nameless something in the aspect, tranquil though the expression, and beauteous though the features, roused that instinct of danger which the sight of a tiger or serpent arouses. I felt that this manlike image was endowed with forces inimical to man.

We must first understand what the purport of society and the aim of government is held to be. If it be your intention to confer a certain elevation upon the human mind, and to teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantage, to give birth to living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations, nor unprepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be the result of its efforts, will leave a name forever famous in time—if you believe such to be the principal object of society, you must avoid the government of democracy, which would be a very uncertain guide to the end you have in view. But if you hold it to be expedient to divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and to the acquirement of the necessaries of life; if a clear understanding be more profitable to man than genius; if your object be not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but to create habits of peace; if you had rather witness vices than crimes and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offences be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant state of society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of opinion that the principal object of a Government is not to confer the greatest possible share of power and of glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest degree of enjoyment and the least degree of misery to each of the individuals who compose it—if such be your desires, you can have no surer means of satisfying them than by equalizing the conditions of men, and establishing democratic institutions.

After Us, the Salamanders!, The Future belongs to the Newts, Newts Mean Cultural Revolution. Even if they don't have their own art (they explained) at least they are not burdened with idiotic ideals, dried up traditions and all the rigid and boring things taught in schools and given the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and culture in any of its forms. The word culture is senile and it makes us sick. Human art has been with us for too long and is worn-out and if the newts have never fallen for it we will make a new art for them. We, the young, will blaze the path for a new world of salamandrism: we wish to be the first newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow! And so the young poetic movement of salamandrism was born, triton - or tritone - music was composed and pelagic painting, inspired by the shape world of jellyfish, fish and corals, made its appearance. There were also the water regulating structures made by the newts themselves which were discovered as a new source of beauty and dignity. We've had enough of nature, the slogans went; bring on the smooth, concrete shores instead of the old and ragged cliffs! Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be outlined with clean straight lines and re-shaped into conic sections and rhombuses; the old geological must be replaced with a world of geometry. In short, there was once again a new trend that was to be the thing of the future, a new aesthetic sensation and new cultural manifestoes; anyone who failed to join in with the rise of salamandrism before it was too late felt bitterly that he had missed his time, and he would take his revenge by making calls for the purity of mankind, a return to the values of the people and nature and other reactionary slogans. A concert of tritone music was booed off the stage in Vienna, at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris a pelagic painting called Capriccio en Bleu was slashed by an unidentified perpetrator; salamandrism was simply victorious, and its rise was unstoppable.

Between the extreme limits of this series would find a place all the forms of prestige resulting from the different elements composing a civilisation -- sciences, arts, literature, &c. -- and it would be seen that prestige constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion. Consciously or not, the being, the idea, or the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of contagion, and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and of giving expression to its thought. This imitation, moreover, is, as a rule, unconscious, which accounts for the fact that it is perfect. The modern painters who copy the pale colouring and the stiff attitudes of some of the Primitives are scarcely alive to the source of their inspiration. They believe in their own sincerity, whereas, if an eminent master had not revived this form of art, people would have continued blind to all but its naïve and inferior sides. Those artists who, after the manner of another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with all the elements of civilisation. It is seen from what precedes that a number of factors may be concerned in the genesis of prestige; among them success was always one of the most important. Every successful man, every idea that forces itself into recognition, ceases, ipso facto, to be called in question. The proof that success is one of the principal stepping-stones to prestige is that the disappearance of the one is almost always followed by the disappearance of the other. The hero whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted to-day should he have been overtaken by failure. The re-action, indeed, will be the stronger in proportion as the prestige has been great. The crowd in this case considers the fallen hero as an equal, and takes its revenge for having bowed to a superiority whose existence it no longer admits.

KNOW YOUR VALUE AND YOUR CAPABILITIES Make sure you see yourself the way God sees you not through the eyes of those who don’t value you. When the world portrays you as an untamed animal Be still and know that you are a valuable and a unique human being. When people call you a fish wife Be still and know that you are the most composed and loving human being. When they label you as a ringleader Be still and know that you are a lady or a gentleman of complete integrity. When they question your competence and try to dismantle it Be still and show the attitude of excellence and kindness. When they are busy whispering your name in every corner of the building Be still and remain focused. Be strong, be courageous and know that you are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God our Creator.

Einstein served as a source of inspiration for many of the modernist artists and thinkers, even when they did not understand him. This was especially true when artists celebrated such concepts as being “free from the order of time,” as Proust put it in the closing of Remembrance of Things Past. “How I would love to speak to you about Einstein,” Proust wrote to a physicist friend in 1921. “I do not understand a single word of his theories, not knowing algebra. [Nevertheless] it seems we have analogous ways of deforming Time.”54 A pinnacle of the modernist revolution came in 1922, the year Einstein’s Nobel Prize was announced. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published that year, as was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was a midnight dinner party in May at the Majestic Hotel in Paris for the opening of Renard, composed by Stravinsky and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Stravinsky and Diaghilev were both there, as was Picasso. So, too, were both Joyce and Proust, who “were destroying 19th century literary certainties as surely as Einstein was revolutionizing physics.” The mechanical order and Newtonian laws that had defined classical physics, music, and art no longer ruled.

After de Havilland handed him the award, Matthau began, rather formally, “Uh, when one is nominated for an achievement award in any field of endeavour, I suppose it’s natural that one immediately starts thinking of an acceptance speech in the event that one wins. I must confess that I’ve given the matter some thought, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything.” After a burst of audience laughter, he continued, “However, my wife” – and he paused right here, for added emphasis – “wrote something for me.” He removed a piece of paper from his breast pocket, which he began reading: “This award, which I have won tonight, is due in no small part to the constant inspiration and selfless devotion of one beautiful, wise, witty, charming, and rich girl whose being is a monument to pure love. Carol Matthau, thank you.” As he read the note, he paused after each phrase. […] Matthau earned the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Best Actor Tony for The Odd Couple… Just as he did in his earlier Tony Award acceptance speech, Matthau declared that his words were composed by Carol. In what Variety described as a “poker-faced reading,” he managed to cleverly work in the names of his children, mother-in-law, and wife.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, talks of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. —Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely. Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them—and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.

Eros is not merely a demoniac power who creates chaos and destruction, locking the whole of life in binding fetters. In all ages, this same power has been a source of irresistible energy. The love of man and woman, which God has placed in the heart of mankind as one of the mightiest aids to the maintenance of the species, is also one of the greatest inspirations of human culture. This is the force which sets heroism aflame and inspires artists; it urges men to achievements which they never would dream of attempting in their sober senses. Where would the divine spark of poetry be, or the sweet harmony of our composers, not the mention the deep feeling which moves us to much in the old folk songs, but for this inner urge which can turn any stripling into a poet? All the great creative artists mankind has produced were sensitive, not to say sensual, individuals, and we should bring a sympathetic understanding to bear upon their failings if now and then they overstep the bounds, not only of narrow conventions, but even of the accepted moral code. . . . Certainly the natural Eros is capable of anything -- of noble deeds or of abysmal follies, of highest self-sacrifice or senseless destruction. But does this entitle us to condemn the intensity of the fire which can cook a meal or bake a potter's masterpiece and, on the other hand, is also capable of burning down an entire city, sweeping away countless works of art in its destructive course? Man tries by every art to harness destructive forces and employ them constructively for his own convenience and profit. It is equally morality's task to use the mighty power of this primitive urge to the highest ends, but no part of the true morality's function either to malign or condemn the sexual instinct.

WISDOM KEEPER: My Extraordinary Journey to Unlock the Sacred Within “Chloe’s heartfelt journey is the real deal here to inspire us all. She takes the reader on a journey of darkness to light, struggle to freedom, fear to love. Thank you, Chloe, for this incredible ride. A must read for all who want true transformation.”— Dr. Shannon South, Award-Winning Therapist, Best-Selling Author, and Founder of the Ignite Your Life and business programs “There is a healing purpose in every experience written by Chloe in this spiritual memoir. She shares processes for healing in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms, showing us our ability to use all levels of energy to achieve deep and lasting healing. Chloe reveals to us the importance of connection—with the spiritual and physical world, and our past lives to the present. She reminds us we are essential in the Universe; when we heal, our loved ones, people around us, and the Earth also heals. Chloe inspires us to do the same thing. Well done. I appreciate it very much. This book is truly for everyone. — Eduardo Morales, Shamanic Curandero, Tepoztlán, Mexico “WISDOM KEEPER is filled with wonderful personal experiences on the power of healing, visualizations, dreams, and listening to our inner voices. Chloe Kemp describes encounters with others on a multitude of levels, including sacred beings, shamans, and other deep-souled humans. This book inspires the reader to go deep within themselves and invite their own personal self-healer to emerge. Chloe helps us to understand that anything is possible.”—River Guerguerian, Sound Immersion Healer, Musician, Composer, and Educator  “Having met and worked with Chloe personally, I know she is a genuine woman with a mission and clear determination to fulfill her purpose in this life. She has followed the call from Spirit to share stories from her life and wisdom she has gained, weaving energies and expressing a frequency of consciousness that has a way of bringing readers to a deeper state of awareness and potency upon their own unique journey. Chloe's book shines a light on our ability to reconnect with the origin of what makes us each a special part of the Divine plan, and she does it in a very humble and approachable way."—Michael Brasunas, Holistic Energy Healer and Bodyworker “Your inspiring memoir is engaging and thought-provoking throughout. It brings together the highest spiritual insights and practical frameworks that everyone can understand and apply.”—Louise, Australia  “A fascinating read!”—Caleb, USA  “The narrative is immensely raw and deeply personal. It engaged all of my emotions completely.”—Abantika, India   “A remarkable story.”—Michael, USA “The writing style is amazing.Your life experiences are so unique.”—Taibaya, Pakistan  “You have a gift for spiritual healing and telling a story. You created a hopeful, sincere, compelling, interesting, and important story.”—Jessica, USA “You tell events, dreams, and moments in your life in a very engaging and thought-provoking way.”—Josh, USA  “Very entertaining, awakening, and engaging; as well as informative, practical, motivating and inspiring.”—Susan, USA      

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett’s inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion…

I asked myself, “What are these people up to, coming to this place, so carefully curated, traveling these great distances, looking at these paintings? And what do they believe they are up to?” One painting featured the Immaculate Conception of Mary, brilliantly composed. The Mother of God was rising to heaven, in a beatific state, encapsulated in a mandorla of clouds, embedded with the faces of putti. Many of the people gathered were gazing, enraptured, at the work. I thought, “They do not know what that painting means. They do not understand the symbolic meaning of the mandorla, or the significance of the putti, or the idea of the glorification of the Mother of God. And God, after all, is dead—or, so goes the story. Why does the painting nonetheless retain its value? Why is it in this room, in this building, with these other paintings, in this city—carefully guarded, not to be touched? Why is this painting—and all these others—beyond price and desired by those who already have everything? Why are these creations stored so carefully in a modern shrine, and visited by people from all over the world, as if it were a duty—even as if it were desirable or necessary?” We treat these objects as if they are sacred. At least that is what our actions in their vicinity suggest. We gaze at them in ignorance and wonder, and remember what we have forgotten; perceiving, ever so dimly, what we can no longer see (what we are perhaps no longer willing to see). The unknown shines through the productions of great artists in partially articulated form. The awe-inspiring ineffable begins to be realized but retains a terrifying abundance of its transcendent power. That is the role of art, and that is the role of artists. It is no wonder we keep their dangerous, magical productions locked up, framed, and apart from everything else. And if a great piece is damaged anywhere, the news spreads worldwide. We feel a tremor run through the bedrock of our culture. The dream upon which our reality depends shakes and moves. We find ourselves unnerved.

As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half-Black brother of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, born to her father and a woman he enslaved.16

Still, the gospels are not biographies but apologetic documents, composed to persuade, to inspire, and to convince. (John is explicit about this: “These are written that you may believe…and that believing you may have life in his name.”) The gospels must be read critically, with a sense of historical context. Which is to say, the Last Words that we are about to encounter may or may not have actually been spoken by Jesus. What is certain is that each of the evangelists thought it important for his audience to believe that Jesus had said them.

As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.

The natural world is more recognizable and identifiable in its unaffected replies and usual predictability. This genuineness does have residual seepage observable in the surreal world of humanity as well, in instances where nature or a natural reality is observed in experience with an impassioned, ephemeral detection and the entirety of the world is shortly exposed as still living, composed of material, substance, texture and essence beyond the normalized human exposure of chosen limits of sensitivities, of closing endpoints of understanding, of illusory trickeries of senses, bewildering connotations of truth, and prospering beliefs in a newer, grander realism of self and the world without vital appreciation of a contextual reckoning of proportionality embedded within the curving, yielding designs of universal scales.” “Aspergic tendencies can establish a lifelong process of rebellious, reciprocated self-learning and self-teaching, whether the lessons taught are from oneself or insightful others during watchful experiences seeking new, keen-sighted inspirations to be marked by patterned, humorously strange and unexpectedly connected presences. It makes an individual believe in a perceived world which exists better in the enactions of others, while the real world of behaving, sensing and seeing a differently textured reality becomes an alleged fantasy.” “To an aspergic personality, allistic normalcy can be an enthrallment contrary to a naturally minded quest for equilibrium as a relationship with all reality. There can be guilt over one’s own social inadequacy. Inane separation can come from not wanting to impose such great exertion requirements on most others for the sake of a singular attending identity.” “As with multitudes of peoples under clever and hard-fought capitulation, nature quietly must adhere and defer to the idea of the perfect fusion of mind and body as fitting the successes of humanity accidentally shaped as the dualistic and sensitive personification of celestial, god-imaged spirituality within the universe.

After sleepless nights you encounter the moments of utter commitment. You face the difficulties and you seems so right with the world. After sleepless nights you encounter the moments of utter commitment. You face the difficulties and you seems so right with the world. Your constant efforts took your pain away. You are on the journey of finding your true value and morals. You are thriving and willing to develop internal peace. You might misstep and fall over and over again, but your need for the answers and your curiosity never cease to motivate you. You are composed and you are driven by your heart, intellectual, intelligence, bravery and soul." - Shwin J Brad

As all power, Kamasqa is both an effluence, an etheric light fluid, as well as a dreaming. It is always creative, just as any river that is born of the melting of the glaciers, which starts as a trickle and then becomes the roaring rivers that feed the ocean. Along its way it creates habitat through life, it creates opportunities, lands to be cultivated and the people to be fed from it. I, personally, as with everything that is good medicine, take the stance of the poet when it comes to my relationship with Kamasqa. I try not to define it too much. I try just to understand that it visits me in different expressions, and every one of the expressions allows me to be more creative as a soul because I am anointed and touched by its flowing through me. It never composes me, it never defines me, but it does inspire me. And it does help dream me into being. And that’s how I understand Kamasqa to be. Creative power is a good definition, but there is much more to it.

Keeping senses under control, devoid of anger and hate, remaining composed equally in sorrow and happiness, peaceful knower of the essence, is a saintly accomplishment.

First you have to take your skills and talent somewhere , In order for your skills and talent to take you everywhere.

We need an orchestrated, “positive liberty” world. We need geniuses to compose the symphonies, inspiring conductors to lead the orchestra, brilliant musicians for each instrument, singers able to execute fantastic harmonies, audiences capable of appreciating the highest quality and being transported out of themselves and spurred on to achieve great things themselves.

AKKA MAHADEVI Around nine hundred years ago in southern India, there lived a female mystic called Akka Mahadevi. Akka was a devotee of Shiva. Ever since her childhood, she had regarded Shiva as her beloved, her husband. It was not just a belief; for her it was a living reality. The king saw this beautiful young woman one day, and decided he wanted her as his wife. She refused. But the king was adamant and threatened her parents, so she yielded. She married the man, but she kept him at a physical distance. He tried to woo her, but her constant refrain was, “Shiva is my husband.” Time passed and the king’s patience wore thin. Infuriated, he tried to lay his hands upon her. She refused. “I have another husband. His name is Shiva. He visits me, and I am with him. I cannot be with you.” Because she claimed to have another husband, she was brought to court for prosecution. Akka is said to have announced to all present, “Being a queen doesn’t mean a thing to me. I will leave.” When the king saw the ease with which she was walking away from everything, he made a last futile effort to salvage his dignity. He said, “Everything on your person—your jewels, your garments—belongs to me. Leave it all here and go.” So, in the full assembly, Akka just dropped her jewelry, all her clothes, and walked away naked. From that day on, she refused to wear clothes even though many tried to convince her otherwise. It was unbelievable for a woman to be walking naked on the streets of India at the time—and this was a beautiful young woman. She lived out her life as a wandering mendicant and composed some exquisite poetry that lives on to this very day. In a poem (translated by A. K. Ramanujan), she says: People, male and female, blush when a cloth covering their shame comes loose. When the lord of lives lives drowned without a face in the world, how can you be modest? When all the world is the eye of the lord, onlooking everywhere, what can you cover and conceal? Devotees of this kind may be in this world but not of it. The power and passion with which they lived their lives make them inspirations for generations of humanity. Akka continues to be a living presence in the Indian collective consciousness, and her lyrical poems remain among the most prized works of South Indian literature to this very day. Embracing

The second main argument to support the idea that simple living enhances our capacity for pleasure is that it encourages us to attend to and appreciate the inexhaustible wealth of interesting, beautiful, marvelous, and thought-provoking phenomena continually presented to us by the everyday world that is close at hand. As Emerson says: “Things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.”47 Here, as elsewhere, Emerson elegantly articulates the theory, but it is his friend Thoreau who really puts it into practice. Walden is, among other things, a celebration of the unexotic and a demonstration that the overlooked wonders of the commonplace can be a source of profound pleasure readily available to all. This idea is hardly unique to Emerson and Thoreau, of course, and, like most of the ideas we are considering, it goes back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius reflects that “anyone with a feeling for nature—a deeper sensitivity—will find it all gives pleasure,” from the jaws of animals to the “distinct beauty of old age in men and women.”48 “Even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charms, its own attractiveness,” he observes, citing as an example the way loaves split open on top when baking.49 With respect to the natural world, celebrating the ordinary has been a staple of literature and art at least since the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote three separate poems in praise of the lesser celandine, a common wildflower; painters like van Gogh discover whole worlds of beauty and significance in a pair of peasant boots; many of the finest poems crafted by poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney take as their subject the most mundane objects, activities, or events and find in these something worth lingering over and commemorating in verse: a singing thrush, a snowy woods, a fish, some chilled plums, a patch of mint. Of course, artists have also celebrated the extraordinary, the exotic, and the magnificent. Homer gushes over the splendors of Menelaus’s palace; Gauguin left his home country to seek inspiration in the more exotic environment of Tahiti; Handel composed pieces to accompany momentous ceremonial occasions. Yet it is striking that a humble activity like picking blackberries—the subject of well-known poems by, among others, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Wilbur—appears to be more inspirational to modern poets, more charged with interest and significance, than, say, the construction of the world’s tallest building, the Oscar ceremonies, the space program, or the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. One might even say that it has now become an established function of art to help us discover the remarkable in the commonplace

Can we believe that “all Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16)? Here is why I think we can. It is remarkable in composition. Composed over sixteen centuries by forty authors. Begun by Moses in Arabia and finished by John on Patmos. Penned by kings in palaces, shepherds in tents, and prisoners in prisons. Would it be possible for forty writers, writing in three different languages and several different countries, separated by as much as sixteen hundred years, to produce a book of singular theme unless behind them there was one mind and one designer? It is remarkable in durability. It is the single most published book in history. Translated into at least twelve hundred languages.17 Bibles have been burned by governments and banished from courtrooms, but God’s Word endures. The death knell has been sounded a hundred times, but God’s Word continues. It is remarkable in prophecy. More than three hundred fulfilled prophecies about the life of Christ,18 were all written at least four hundred years before he was born. Imagine if something similar occurred today. If we found a book written in 1900 that prophesied two world wars, a depression, an atomic bomb, and the assassinations of a president and a civil rights leader, wouldn’t we trust it? Glory Days

Only the most fervent continues to accept the idea that the Bible is infallible or that it was composed via divine inspiration. To believe otherwise is to take logic and feed it to faith where it dies of intellectual starvation.

I’ll probably paint on this piano after I compose, for that will inspire me to make more awesome works.

Every great idea has a spark of inspiration. Divine…if the shoe fits. Every great spark of inspiration comes from a remarkably intense passion, love, or desire. It can be out of love for God, a family member, a lover, child, friend, or just out of a desire to be compassionate and help others. It can be an intense passion for music, art, physical comforts, or beauty. It can be from the desire to prove those who hurt, wrong, or doubt them wrong because they themselves are not yet capable of asking questions and chasing dreams which seem so far away. The paradox of any genius or creative virtuoso is that they see one plus one does not equal two and they do not consult the mathematicians to hear what they have to say about this. When the idea or project they desire to create is fueled from a combination of these previously mentioned factors and then ignited by a pure intention of their heart and soul it is more than the sum of its’ parts. It is no longer a song composed of a melody and words or a picture brushed with paint upon an easel. It is a masterpiece with an explanation which can only be hinted or pointed at. Just like the moon can only reflect the light passed on to it by the sun. Personally, a master watch maker is a person I look up to. They lovingly and thoughtfully put immense energy and concentration on putting seemingly small pieces into place that once put into place learn to work on their own in perfect synchronization and harmony. However, this working together of gears and pieces does not happen by itself; It happens because the master had a vision of what he wanted and put in the time, energy, love, and effort to make it happen. The designer didn’t have it materialize right in front of their face instantly. Rather, they had faith it would come together a piece at a time. It’s my mission to find as many of these Masters who don’t run away from their ability to love, be loved, and create. The more we present beauty to those around us, the quicker others will find light within themselves. The more assistance we give to those we know struggling with poverty both inside and externally, the quicker we change this world into what it’s meant to be.

The Internet has co-opted the word “browse” for its own purposes, but it’s worth pointing out the difference between browsing in a virtual realm and browsing in the actual world. Depending on the terms entered, an Internet search engine will usually come up with hundreds, thousands, or millions of hits, which a person can then skate through, clicking when she sees something that most closely echoes her interest. It is a curious quality of the Internet that it can be composed of an unfathomable multitude and, at the same time, almost always deliver to the user the bits that feed her already-held interests and confirm her already-held beliefs. It points to a paradox that is, perhaps, one of the most critical of our time: To have access to everything may be to have nothing in particular. After all, what good does this access do if we can only find our way back to ourselves, the same selves, the same interests, the same beliefs over and over? Is what we really want to be solidified, or changed? If solidified, then the Internet is well-designed for that need. But, if we wish to be changed, to be challenged and undone, then we need a means of placing ourselves in the path of an accident. For this reason, the plenitude may narrow the mind. Amazon may curate the world for you, but only by sifting through your interests and delivering back to you variations on your well-rehearsed themes: Yes, I do love Handke! Yes, I had been meaning to read that obscure play by Thomas Bernhard! A bookstore, by contrast, asks you to scan the shelves on your way to looking for the thing you had in mind. You go in meaning to buy Hemingway, but you end up with Homer instead. What you think you like or want is not always what you need. A bookstore search inspires serendipity and surprise.

Feel the energy, starting with your hands, and if you maintain the sensation of being connected to that energy as you pray, you can be more deeply immersed in your prayer. The reason is because the entire universe itself is composed of the energy you're feeling with your hands right now. When you maintain that feeling of connection with the universe as you pray for the great hopes and dreams cherished by your soul, you are broadcasting your prayer to the entire universe as your audience. If the whole universe is resonating with your dream and working with you to make your dream come true, wouldn't that lend great strength to you?

If you have to run then learn from Bolt, if you have to fight watch Muhammad Ali`s jab and grab punches, if dunking with a basketball does it for you why not pull a Vince Carter or fly in like Michael Jordan , if science and evolution tickles your fancy have you read "Evolution" by Charles Darwin? Well, Like Martin Luther king said " If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." So pickup that broom , get started and stop complaining!

A jitendriya or stoic remains composed and converts his weakness and threats into his strength and opportunities

FOR MANY YEARS, I was on a committee that read and selected papers to be published at SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference I mentioned in chapter 2. These papers were supposed to present ideas that advanced the field. The committee was composed of many of the field’s most prominent players, all of whom I knew; it was a group that took the task of selecting papers very seriously. At each of the meetings, I was struck that there seemed to be two kinds of reviewers: some who would look for flaws in the papers, and then pounce to kill them; and others who started from a place of seeking and promoting good ideas. When the “idea protectors” saw flaws, they pointed them out gently, in the spirit of improving the paper—not eviscerating it. Interestingly, the “paper killers” were not aware that they were serving some other agenda (which was often, in my estimation, to show their colleagues how high their standards were). Both groups thought they were protecting the proceedings, but only one group understood that by looking for something new and surprising, they were offering the most valuable kind of protection. Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.

That beautiful Shirazi Turk, took control and my heart stole, I'll give Samarkand & Bukhara, for her Hindu beauty mole. O wine-bearer bring me wine, such wine not found in Heavens By running brooks, in flowery fields, spend your days and stroll. Alas, these sweet gypsy clowns, these agitators of our town Took the patience of my heart, like looting Turks take their toll. Such unfinished love as ours, the Beloved has no need, For the Perfect Beauty, frills and adornments play no role. I came to know Joseph's goodness, that daily would increase Even the chaste Mistress succumbed to the love she would extol. Whether profane or even cursed, I'll reply only in praise Sweetness of tongue and the lips, even bitterness would enthrall. Heed the advice of the wise, make your most endeared goal, The fortunate blessed youth, listen to the old wise soul. Tell tales of song and wine, seek not secrets of the world, None has found and no-one will, knowledge leaves this riddle whole. You composed poems and sang, Hafiz, you spent your days well Venus wedded to your songs, in the firmaments' inverted bowl.

Walt had a way of communicating that was just magical,” composer Richard Sherman told me. “Simple, but magical. He would give you a challenge and say, ‘I know you can do this.’ He made you believe anything was possible. He made you proud to be on his team. And it really was a team effort—Walt would roll up his sleeves and go to work alongside the rest of us. “He saw potential in people who had never really done anything great. My brother Robert and I really had no track record in the music industry, but Walt heard a few of our songs and he gave us an opportunity and inspired us to keep topping ourselves. Without Walt to inspire us, I don’t know where we’d be today. “Walt always wanted you to find something wonderful in yourself, to believe in it and consider it God’s gift to you. God gives you the gift, and the rest is up to you. Walt taught me that what you do with that gift is your gift back to God.

For the early Christians, the Psalms were about their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Any songs or hymns or psalms that the early Christians might have composed about Christ or to Christ merely supplemented the inspired hymnbook of Israel, now appropriated by the church as its own collection of hymns about Christ. Then, as now, Jesus Christ was the center of the religious music of the church-yet in a way that never detracted from the glory of God or compromised biblical monotheism.

Not to be confused with Der Flügel, which is an earlier form of the baby grand piano, the Flugelhorn is a wind instrument akin to the trumpet, but has a wider, conical bore. It is actually a descendant of the valved bugle, which had been developed from a hunting horn known in eighteenth-century Germany as a Flügelhorn. This valved instrument is similar to the B♭pitch of many trumpets and cornets and was actually inspired by the eighteenth-century saxhorn on which the flugelhorn is modeled. The German word Flügel means wing and in the early part of the 18th century Germany the leader or Führer of the hunt was known as a Flügelmeister who issued his orders of the hunt with, you guessed it, a Flügelhorn. Some modern flugelhorns feature a fourth valve that adds a lower range and extends the instrument's abilities, however some players use the fourth valve in place of the first and third valve combination making the instrument somewhat sharper and more confusing. The tone range is "fatter" and usually regarded as more “mellow” and “darker” than the trumpet or cornet. The sound of the flugelhorn has been described as halfway between a trumpet and a French horn and is a standard member of the British-style brass band. Joe Bishop an American jazz musician and composer, not to be confused with Joey Bishop of the Rat Pack, was a member of the Woody Herman band and was one of the earliest jazz musicians to use the flugelhorn.

Biblical inspiration may be defined as God’s superintending of the human authors so that, using their own individual personalities and even their writing styles, they composed and recorded without error His revelation to humankind in the words of the original manuscripts. In other words, the original documents of the Bible were written by men who were permitted to exercise their own personalities and literary talents but who wrote under the control and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the result being a perfect and errorless recording of the exact message God desired to give to humankind.

Where did Judith’s most ground-breaking intuitions come from? Did they come from the realm of logic and rationality? Or from a world beyond it, the very same that had inspired Bach to compose his fugues, and the Impressionists to capture life in all of its fleeting nature?

We each engage in artistic conversations with the external environment. Rather than merely surrendering to forces that surround us, our inspired action of responding with heart and mind composes our final configuration.

Dear God, let me be a composer. Even though dark rhythms may emerge around me, help me write my own song. Amen.

Past the woodshed, past the creek that ran behind our inn, deep in the wild heart of the forest, was a circle of alder trees we called the Goblin Grove. The trees grew in such a way as to suggest twisted arms and monstrous limbs frozen in an eternal dance, and Constanze liked to tell us that the trees had once been humans- naughty young women- who displeased Der Erlkönig. As children we had played here, Josef and me, played and sang and danced, offering our music to the Lord of Mischief. The Goblin King was the silhouette around which my music was composed, and the Goblin Grove was the place my shadows came to life. I spied a scarlet shape in the woods ahead of me. Käthe in my cloak, walking to my sacred space. An irrational, petty slash of irritation cut through my dread and unease. The Goblin Grove was my haunt, my refuge, my sanctuary. Why must she take everything that was mine? My sister had a gift for turning the extraordinary into the ordinary. Unlike my brother and me- who lived in the ether of magic and music- Käthe lived in the world of the real, the tangible, the mundane. Unlike us, she never had faith.

Write this play like a composer. I’ve always said that the best members of this troupe came from musicals, and I stand by that. To do what we do, you gotta be able to hear the music—even when it isn’t there.

Someone asked him once what had inspired the studies, since you can so clearly hear that he was telling some kind of very beautiful story, and he just said, ‘I don’t believe in the artist that discloses too much of his images. Let them paint for themselves what it most suggests.’ I’ve always loved that.” Valencia loved it, too, because she’d always imagined the song was about her, and this information made her feel like she had the composer’s permission to do that. She was listening to it the way he meant her to. It was about love, after all. The complicated, possibly sort of requited to some extent but completely impossible and undeserved kind.

A minister was walking by a construction project and saw two men laying bricks. “What are you doing?” he asked the first. “I’m laying bricks,” he answered gruffly. “And you?’’ he asked the other. “I’m building a cathedral,” came the happy reply. The minister was agreeably impressed with this man’s idealism and sense of participation in God’s Grand Plan. He composed a sermon on the subject, and returned the next day to speak to the inspired bricklayer. Only the first man was at work. “Where’s your friend?” asked the minister. “He got fired.” “How terrible. Why?” “He thought we were building a cathedral, but we’re building a garage.”9 So ask yourself: am I designing a cathedral or a garage? The difference between the two is important, and it’s often hard to tell them apart when your focus is on laying bricks. Sometimes

As you look for solutions, seek for wholeness. The bridge to wholeness is an increasingly broader perspective and an increasingly greater inclusion of life. The world of structure would have you believe that reality is that which is permanent and illusion is that which is changeable. It would have you believe that when a thing is changeable, it is just illusion. If it is permanent, then it is real. Anything is real that is composed of love, spirit, and adamantine particles. These three aspects of reality can be shaped and reshaped in infinite ways or perceived from infinite directions without diminishing their reality. Life is a veritable river of fluid possibilities.

The shell of the scaly foot possesses a number of additional energy-dissipation features compared to typical mollusk shells that are primarily composed of calcium carbonate." The industrial opportunities already anticipated include superior helmets, protective armor, and new structural materials. Pyrites and gregite are also cheap being evaluated as an alternative to silicone for the creation of cheap, abundant solar cells.

That the painting composes itself through a moment’s inspiration? The artist must have a strategy every bit as cunning as that of the commander of a great army.

Using poise is not being fake; it is being professional, strong, and composed.

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In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'.

To find out, he hooked up a group of people—some highly creative and others less so—to EEG machines, then gave them a series of tests that measure creative thinking. The results were surprising: the more creatively inclined subjects showed lower cortical arousal while taking the test than did the noncreative subjects. The heightened concentration of cortical arousal is helpful when balancing your checkbook or evading a tiger, concluded Martindale, but not when trying to compose an opera or write a novel or come up with the Next Big Internet Thing. For that, we need to enter a state that Martindale called defocused, or diffused, attention. Someone in this state of mind is not scattered, at least not as we normally think of the word. Like Buddhists, they have mastered the art of “detached attachment.” They are both focused and unfocused at the same time. But why, Martindale wondered, are some people able to benefit from this diffused attention while others are not? Creative people are no more capable of controlling their cortical arousal levels than noncreative people. Creative achievements, he concluded, are based not on self-control “but rather on unintentional inspiration.” Unintentional inspiration? What can that mean? Martindale, who passed away in 2008, never said, but I can’t help but wonder if this phenomenon explains why creative people are often restless. By changing locations, they are unconsciously attempting to lower their levels of cortical arousal, defocus their attention.

Akin to any other human being’s creations composed from inspirational toil, the textual rendering of a person depicted in personal essay writing asserts an existence independent of the author. A personal writing voice speaks to me from a secluded mental closet. Writing makes private mental musings a public act.

Everything in all manifested universes is composed of strings. They are created immediately after a Big Bang and they rapidly multiply like viruses or bacteria until they are brought under the control by dark matter and dark energy.

Another example of the same attitude, this time on a less cosmic and more humble scale, comes from the life of the warrior-poet Egil Skallagrimsson. According to his saga, toward the end of his life, one of his sons died, after the others had died before him. Such was the depth of Egil's grief that he planned to kill himself, but his surviving daughter convinced him instead to use his poetic talent to compose a memorial poem for his lost children. Egil's poem is called The Wreck Of Sons (Sonatorrek). In it, Egil bemoans his lot in life and curses Odin, his patron god, for having made him suffer so much. But Egil finds that this suffering has also carried a gift within it, for his anguish inspires him to compose better poetry than ever before. He lets loose an eloquent cry of both despair and joy, or at least contented acceptance. The final three stanzas read: I offer nothing With an eager heart To the greatest of gods, The willful Odin. But I must concede That the friend of the wise Has paid me well For all my wounds. The battle-tested Foe of the wolf Has given me A towering art, And wits to discern In those around me Who wishes well, Who wishes ill. Times are dire, Yet glad is my heart, Full of courage, Without complaint. I wait for the goddess Of dirt and of death Who stands on the headland To bear me away.

How we are likely to feel when our needs are being met absorbed adventurous affectionate alert alive amazed amused animated appreciative ardent aroused astonished blissful breathless buoyant calm carefree cheerful comfortable complacent composed concerned confident contented cool curious dazzled delighted eager ebullient ecstatic effervescent elated enchanted encouraged energetic engrossed enlivened enthusiastic excited exhilarated expansive expectant exultant fascinated free friendly fulfilled glad gleeful glorious glowing good-humored grateful gratified happy helpful hopeful inquisitive inspired intense interested intrigued invigorated involved joyous, joyful jubilant keyed-up loving mellow merry mirthful moved optimistic overjoyed overwhelmed peaceful perky pleasant pleased proud quiet radiant rapturous refreshed relaxed relieved satisfied secure sensitive serene spellbound splendid stimulated surprised tender thankful thrilled touched tranquil trusting upbeat warm wide-awake wonderful zestful How we are likely to feel when our needs are not being met afraid aggravated agitated alarmed aloof angry anguished annoyed anxious apathetic apprehensive aroused ashamed beat bewildered bitter blah blue bored brokenhearted chagrined cold concerned confused cool cross dejected depressed despairing despondent detached disaffected disappointed discouraged disenchanted disgruntled disgusted disheartened dismayed displeased disquieted distressed disturbed downcast downhearted dull edgy embarrassed embittered exasperated exhausted fatigued fearful fidgety forlorn frightened frustrated furious gloomy guilty harried heavy helpless hesitant horrible horrified hostile hot humdrum hurt impatient indifferent intense irate irked irritated jealous jittery keyed-up lazy leery lethargic listless lonely mad mean miserable mopey morose mournful nervous nettled numb overwhelmed panicky passive perplexed pessimistic puzzled rancorous reluctant repelled resentful restless sad scared sensitive shaky shocked skeptical sleepy sorrowful sorry spiritless startled surprised suspicious tepid terrified tired troubled uncomfortable unconcerned uneasy unglued unhappy unnerved unsteady upset uptight vexed weary wistful withdrawn woeful worried wretched Summary

What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

Alexandre Dumas, also in the audience, wrote that Shakespeare arrived in France with the “freshness of Adam’s first sight of Eden.” Fellow attendees Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, along with Berlioz and Dumas, would create works inspired by those seminal evenings. The Bard’s electrifying combination of profound human insight and linguistic glory would continue catapulting across national borders to influence poets, painters, and composers the world over, as no other writer has done. Yet the UCLA English department—like so many others—was more concerned that its students encounter race, gender, and disability studies than that they plunge headlong into the overflowing riches of actual English literature—whether Milton, Wordsworth, Thackeray, George Eliot, or dozens of other great artists closer to our own day. How is this possible? The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.

Life is a daily training ground, and we are each composed of the very actions we take in life. If you live carelessly, your mind will become soiled, but if you try to live conscientiously, it will slowly become pure again. If your heart is pure, the world looks brighter. If your world is bright, you can be kinder to others.

The best we can hope for society at large is that the mass of unconscious individuals might develop a moral equivalent to war. The science of man has shown us that society will always be composed of passive subjects, powerful leaders, and enemies upon whom we project our guilt and self-hatred. This knowledge may allow us to develop an "objective hatred" in which the hate object is not a human scapegoat but something impersonal like poverty, disease, oppression, or natural disasters. By making our inevitable hatred intelligent and informed we may be able to turn our destructive energy to a creative use.

Yes. One of the greatest composers once said that music is a dialog between the musician and God. But God answers very rarely, and only to the truly gifted ones, to those who bear his kiss.

The greatest book ever composed was marked at one point unconventional. Also it was marked difficult to read and comprehend, especially in its original format. Yet that book has saved countless lives including mine, and still saves lives today... Think about that when others mention flaws about your work.

A person gathers all their resources to compose a foursquare philosophy for surviving each day, an engagement driving at a union of seemly inapposite associations to spotlight an androgyny of inspiration for living better. Combating self-alienation, roving after dusk without a map, unsure of the topography that lies ahead, a sincere pathfinder tentatively picks their way by using penetrating low beams and flashing wide-angle high beams. Only by continuing on the bewildering path, can we find what we seek. The writer peers into the encasement of gloom seeking out a deferential of lightness and darkness in the midst of the incongruous elements that foreshadow a person’s peripatetic quest to steer a meaningful life. By displaying the coexistence and intersection of blackened sequential realism overlaid on a snowy field of internalized temporal legend, the narrator assiduously lumbers to shed a ban of moonlight on the battered pages of their brash secular existence.

All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.

Do not believe those who try to persuade you that composition is only a cold exercise of the intellect. The only music capable of moving and touching us is that which flows from the depths of a composer’s soul when he is stirred by inspiration. There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination. A few days ago I told you I was working every day without any real inspiration. Had I given way to my disinclination, undoubtedly I should have drifted into a long period of idleness. But my patience and faith did not fail me, and to-day I felt that inexplicable glow of inspiration of which I told you; thanks to which I know beforehand that whatever I write to-day will have power to make an impression, and to touch the hearts of those who hear it. I hope you will not think I am indulging in self-laudation, if I tell you that I very seldom suffer from this disinclination to work. I believe the reason for this is that I am naturally patient. I have learnt to master myself, and I am glad I have not followed in the steps of some of my Russian colleagues, who have no self-confidence and are so impatient that at the least difficulty they are ready to throw up the sponge. This is why, in spite of great gifts, they accomplish so little, and that in an amateur way.

I only recently learned that my sister-in-law is employing what Hebrew scholars term the waw consecutive, an element of syntax upon which Hebrew stories are built. By prefixing a verb form with the letter waw in order to change tense, the writers of Hebrew Scripture move a story along by essentially saying, “And then, and then, and then.” “The composers of biblical prose,” wrote author and scholar Gregory Mobley, “appended the simplest conjunction, ‘and,’ to a line, gave it a little extra vocalization . . . doubled the initial consonant of the word to which the ‘and’ was attached, and voila: the Biblical Hebrew ‘and then.

An author would not compose a book that does not contain a purpose in the context of entire text. Therefore, readers should take advantage to read a fiction or nonfiction book that can educate them about a specific topic that is relevant to real life situations.

Movie composer Henry Mancini, stimulated by Audrey to write ‘Moon River’ and ‘Charade’ and ‘Two for the Road’, always maintained that if you listened carefully to these three songs you could almost determine who inspired them. They were all imbued, he said, with Audrey’s inimitable wistfulness – ‘a kind of slight sadness’.

The general tendency, in explaining form in music, has been to oversimplify. The usual method is to seize upon certain well-known formal molds and demonstrate how composers write works within these molds, to a greater or lesser extent. Close examination of most masterworks, however, will show that they seldom fit so neatly as they are supposed to into the exteriorized forms of the textbooks. The conclusion is inescapable that it is insufficient to assume that structure in music is simply a matter of choosing a formal mold and then filling it with inspired tones. Rightly understood, form can only be the gradual growth of a living organism from whatever premise the composer starts. It follows, then, that “the form of every genuine piece of music is unique.” It is musical content that determines form.

Upon the couple’s return to Vienna, Mozart met Joseph Haydn for the first time in early 1784. The two formed a close friendship and frequently collaborated, utilizing friendly competition to fuel the composition of numerous works from both composers. When Haydn would visit Vienna, it was routine that he and Mozart would play together in a hastily assembled string quartet. Mozart wrote six quartets that were specifically dedicated to Haydn, and many scholars group them as a set of compositions created in response to Haydn’s Opus 33 set, providing further evidence that both composers drew inspiration from each other.

As you’ll read in these stories, almost to a person these subjects were highly intelligent and educated people of science. But it wasn’t until after their NDE experience did they fully begin to understand the power of the super-conscious mind and its existence outside the human brain. The super-conscious mind is the source of all pure creativity. It is the super-conscious mind that is functioning at the creation of anything that is completely new in the universe. The super-conscious mind is tapped into and used by all the great inventors, writers, artists and composers of history on a regular basis, right up to the present day. Every great work of art or creativity is infused with super-conscious energy. Your super-conscious mind can access every piece of information stored in your conscious and subconscious minds. It can also access data and ideas outside your own experience, because it actually lies outside your human mind. This is why it is called a form of universal intelligence. You will often get ideas that come to you from far beyond you. It is not unusual for two people separated by thousands of miles of distance to come up with the same idea at the same time. When you are well-attuned to another person, such as your spouse or mate, you will often have thoughts identical to him or her at the same time during the day, and you will only find out that you had reached the same conclusion when you compare notes hours later. This is an example of your super-conscious mind at work. Sometimes when you are with other positive, goal-oriented people, your combined super-conscious minds will form a higher mind that you can all tap into. This is why, when you are involved in a conversation or listening to a lecture, ideas and inspirations will often leap into your mind that have no direct connection to what is being discussed. But those ideas and inspirations may be exactly what you need at that moment to move you forward on your journey. Because of your super-conscious powers, virtually anything that you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have. Emerson wrote, “A man becomes what he thinks about, most of the time.” Earl Nightingale wrote, “You become what you think about.” In the Bible it says that, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.” And this law of sowing and reaping refers to mental states; to your thoughts. Of course, there is a potential danger in the use of your super-conscious mind. It is like fire - a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. If you use it improperly, and think negative, fearful thoughts, your super-conscious mind will accept your thoughts as a command and go to work to materialize them into your reality.

The Purānas, which are encyclopedic repositories of traditional wisdom, including everything from cosmology to philosophy to stories about kings and holy men. They contain many yogic legends and teachings. The following are especially important: the Bhāgavata-Purāna (also known as Shrīmad-Bhāgavata), Shiva-Purāna, and Devī-Bhāgavata-Purāna (a Tantric work). The so-called Yoga-Upanishads (some twenty texts), most of which were composed after 1000 C.E. and include three extensive works: the Darshana-Upanishad, Yoga-Shikhā-Upanishad and Tejo-Bindu-Upanishad. The texts of Hatha-Yoga, such as the Goraksha-Samhitā, Hatha-Yoga-Pradīpikā, Hatha-Ratna-Avalī, Gheranda-Samhitā, Shiva-Samhitā, Yoga-Yājnavalkya, Yoga-Bīja, Yoga-Shāstra of Dattātreya, Sat-Karma-Samgraha, and the Shiva-Svarodaya, which are all available in English. Vedāntic scriptures like the voluminous Yoga-Vāsishtha, which teaches Jnāna-Yoga, and its traditional abridgment, the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsishtha, both available in English renderings. The literature of the bhakti-mārga or devotional path, which is especially prominent among the Vaishnavas (worshipers of Vishnu) and Shaivas (worshipers of Shiva). There is a considerable literature on bhakti in both Sanskrit and Tamil, as well as various vernacular languages. In particular, I can recommend Nārada’s Bhakti-Sūtra, Shāndilya’s Bhakti-Sūtra, and the extensive Bhāgavata-Purāna, which is a detailed (mythological) account of the birth, life, and death of the God-man Krishna, with many wonderful and inspiring stories of yogins and ascetics. This beautiful work contains the Uddhāva-Gītā, Krishna’s final esoteric instruction to sage Uddhāva. Goddess worship from a Tantric viewpoint is the core of the Devī-Bhāgavata-Purāna, which should also be studied. In addition, sincere Yoga students should also read and ponder the great yogic texts associated with the different schools of Buddhism and Jainism. To encounter the world of Yoga through its literature will challenge the practitioner in many ways: The texts, even in translation and with notes, are often difficult to comprehend and demand serious concentration and perseverance. Yet we do not have to become scholars, but our study (svādhyāya) will show us what it takes to be a real yogin and what magnificent tools Yoga puts at our disposal. It will also further our self-understanding and strengthen our commitment to practice. In his Treasury of Good Advice (1.6), Sakya Pāndita, who was one of the great scholar-adepts of Vajrayāna Buddhism, wrote: Even if one were to die first thing tomorrow, today one must study. Although one may not become a sage in this life, knowledge is firmly accumulated for future lives, just as secured assets can be used later.

Lewis frequently referred to Ireland as a source of literary inspiration, noting how its landscapes were a powerful stimulus to the imagination. Lewis disliked Irish politics and was prone to imagine a pastoral Ireland composed solely of soft hills, mists, loughs, and woods. Ulster, he once confided to his diary, “is very beautiful and if only I could deport the Ulstermen and fill their land with a populace of my own choosing, I should ask for no better place to live in.”[17] (In certain ways, Narnia can be seen as an imaginary and idealised Ulster, populated with creatures of Lewis’s imagination, rather than Ulstermen.)

Sufi mystic and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan once said, “Someday music will be the means of expressing universal religion. Time is wanted for this, but there will come a day when music and its philosophy will become the religion of humanity.” Khan continued, “The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe.” The nature of reality is vibration. Mantra is a Sanskrit word composed of two other Sanskrit words, man, meaning “mind” and tra, meaning “to cross over.” Therefore, mantra is “mind protection,” allowing us to free ourselves from the habitual, unconscious patterns of the thinking mind. When the mind is at peace, then yoga can begin. Sacred music assists in the healing and uplifting of the soul.

Reflect in depth, plan in detail, and execute it with a calm, composed, and detached mind.

I didn’t know exactly what would come next—lately, I’d allowed myself to imagine running a dance company of my own, composed entirely of women. The idea was terrifying, exhilarating, transfixing. I knew now, finally, that those feelings were hard to come by. You had to pay attention when they showed up.

How is it possible for a book of 628 pages to inspire so many different visions?2 Because it consists of so many distinct but interrelated objects — that is to say words, of course, but they denote and evoke things—more things than there are words. Many of the words or formations appear nowhere else, and it is difficult to describe something so much of which you’re seeing for the first time. Its neologisms make it unencompassable, endlessly redefinable. The textual matter of Finnegans Wake developed over seventeen years, just as the meaning for its readers has developed over the seventy- eight years since its first publication. The continual critical redefining of Finnegans Wake partly maps onto its many redefinitions of itself. Both have histories and the list above comprises jumbled fragments of them, concealing a deranged story of ever-shifting perceptions. During the seventeen years of its composition, composed in a manner unlike that used for any other novel, it was always growing. That is it was shifting, splitting, recombining, reconfiguring, restructuring, destructuring, decomposing, and recomposing. One of the things that Finnegans Wake is, is a strange object made in strange ways. By focusing on some of the ways it was made, we will in this book arrive at a further understanding of what it is. Through its continuously self-generating transformation, it is a text of modulation and becoming, flux and flow, an alternative classic of change to the I Ching. Written in a world which was heading towards a confident belief that it could locate, name, and describe anything (all organisms, subatomic particles, links of DNA, black holes), it produced something full of indescribable, unnamable parts. As an unencompassable unfathomable text it remains the best correlative for our unencompassable unfathomable times, changing in its meanings as swiftly as our world, through its feverish reproduction of reproductions.

Second Confrontation With The Limp. Today while ascending the escalators, In the crowd of thousands of spectators, The limp appeared once again, With similar signature of pain and strain, And the drag with which he pulled his right foot, Today seemed shorter than half a foot, He appeared to be moving in a definite direction, Without any doubts or dereliction, As I was ascending the escalator, He was descending the stairs one at a time , like a helpless procrastinator, And there I caught a glimpse of human emotion, A feeling of surging and pristinely humane sensation, A man who must have been in his mid sixties and ascending the escalator beside me, With side parted grey hair and a composed look that even skies longed to see, Caught the sight of the limp holding his bag in his left hand, While he held his right leg with his right hand and pushed it to the next step, to maintain balance and anyhow stand, He descended the stairs with caution, one step at a time, And the left leg, was in complete denial to rhyme, With the floundering right foot supported by his ankle high shoes, But there was nothing to cover or hide his face bearing the painful blues, The man looked at him and turned to see him again and again, Then without making it obvious, he removed his spectacles and cleared his tears, as he revived his look simple and plain, But it seemed he missed a heart beat when he saw the man limping in the crowd, A rush of emotion crossed him and surged his existence and for anyone equally sensitive, it was silent yet very loud, His feelings of sympathy were displayed all over his face, The sadness that he managed to hide with a synthetic grace, Failed in preventing him to constantly turn his head and look at the limping man, Perhaps it reminded him of someone dear or he felt a fellow human beings pain culminating in the form of the limping man, And he quietly wept and maybe felt deeply sorry for the limp and his relentless dragging, For whatever reason the limp too turned and looked back, and both were locked in a momentary emotional tugging, Where the limp gently smiled and bowed a bit, The man tried to smile too but he couldn't, so he lifted his hand slowly and waved it at him, as if to tell him, keep walking, never stop or sit, And then both pursued, rather were lured by their destinies, One ascending, the other one descending, with their own dreams, own hopes and a bunch of certainties, The man must be where he ought to be, the limp too might be at his destination now, But today both of them conquered their destinies with that humbling and simple bow!

Inspired by Zen, the avant-garde composer John Cage shocked the music world in 1952 when he composed a piece that entailed just sitting in silence at a piano or other instrument(s) without playing a single note for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. He wanted the audience to hear the music that is going on around us all the time.

Another classic case in point is the reconstructive origins of the canonical Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, which is attributed to the seventh-century Chinese Zen master Huineng but in fact seems to have first appeared around 780 ce, "over a century after the events it describes were supposed to have taken place." The earliest versions of the autobiography and teachings of Huineng included in this text were in fact composed by Shenhui and other purported successors in the Southern School in order to differentiate their teachings from, and elevate them over, those of Shenxiu and other teachers of the rival Northern School. While the teachings presented in the Platform Sutra— the only Zen text to be audaciously designated a "sutra"—are indeed a "brilliant consummation" and "wonderful mélange of early Chan [i.e., Chinese Zen] teachings," they can hardly be attributed verbatim to the historical person Huineng. However spiritually inspiring and philosophically rich such classical texts of the Zen tradition may be, we cannot read them as unbiased and unembellished historical records or as innocent of sectarian politics and other mundane motives.

A great perfume can express the intangible, but essential, intentions of a designer and convey the constant, enduring, and driving identity of the fashion house. It was through Marc Rosen's advocacy that I came to realize that the greatest modern perfume bottles were an art reflecting art. They exist as design objects in their own right, but are directly responsive to the composition of the scents they hold. A perfume, based on a series of layers and combinations of scent and composed of "notes" in a system that is at once science and subjectivity, is dependent on the sensory and the intuitive. With evocative qualities that are an amalgam of references framing it conceptually, a perfume can inspire possibilities of representation through graphics and the form of its flacon. Perfume bottles reside at the intersection of aesthetics and technology. They are, at their most artful, the sculptural manifestations of the ideas, emotions, and poetry elicited by a fragrance.

I was fifty-eight years old when I finally felt like a “master choreographer.” The occasion was my 128th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, created for American Ballet Theatre. For the first time in my career I felt in control of all the components that go into making a dance—the music, the steps, the patterns, the deployment of people onstage, the clarity of purpose. Finally I had the skills to close the gap between what I could see in my mind and what I could actually get onto the stage. Why did it take 128 pieces before I felt this way? A better question would be, Why not? What’s wrong with getting better as you get more work under your belt? The libraries and archives and museums are packed with early bloomers and one-trick ponies who said everything they had to say in their first novel, who could only compose one good tune, whose canvases kept repeating the same dogged theme. My respect has always gone to those who are in it for the long haul. When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.