The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.
I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.
To me the Muses truly gave An envied and a happy lot: E'en when I lie within the grave, I cannot, shall not, be forgot.
Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.
Here will I live in the rainy season, here in the autumn and in the summer: thus muses the fool. He realizes not the danger (of death).
I guess I'll just slip into the studio after the next time with the Muses, and then just keel over and die.
I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.
There is no wide road which leads to the Muses.
I am impressed by the way Annie Kevans captured the different types of beauties that have been my inspiration and my muses from my grandmother to artists like David Bowie and Boy George.
Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.
The muses crown virtue when fortune refuses to do it.
The virtues, like the Muses, are always seen in groups. A good principle was never found solitary in any breast.
The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.
One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
If you look at the greatest models, it was because they were muses to photographers. They collaborated with the artist and they created the kind of images that become iconic.
Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.
I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.
I was raised by muses. Women who had men in awe of them and who wrote them movies and wrote them music.
She [Kim Kardashian] was always my muse, now she's become other designers' muses.
It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.
