Muses Quotes

 

Muses Quotes

Added April 2005

Quotes I used to share at mental health, department of education, MN state conventions and at middle and high school auditoriums recited along with my own poems and quotes for the benefit especially of those suffering from mental illness, yet blessed with gifts many of which were undiscovered. My wife JoAnne played flute and piano pieces by famous composers who had and do have these compound conditions in order to encourage the presently encumbered to pursue their gifts in order to give to themselves to their compatriots and to the world. JoAnne and I worked with a marvelous organization called “Touched by the Muses”.

Among other works of mine, we included my poems "Burning" and "The Fats of Life".

 

 

 “Terror drove me from place to place. My breath failed

me as I pictured my brain paralyzed.  Ah, Clara, no one knows the suffering, the sickness, the despair of this

illness, except those so crushed.”

Composer Robert Schumann,

Speaking of his manic depression

 

 

“There’s a certain slant of light,

Winter afternoons –

That oppresses, like the heft

Of cathedral tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us.”

Emily Dickinson

 

“Much madness is divinist sense.”

Ibid

 

 

“My creative powers have been reduced to a restless

Indolence. I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything

Either.  I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and

Reading has become repugnant to me.  When we are robbed of

Ourselves, we are robbed of everything.”

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

 

 

“Good morning, Eeyore,” said Pooh.

“Good morning, Pooh Bear,” said Eeyore gloomily;

“If it is a good morning,” said he;

“Which I doubt,” said he.

A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

 

 

“Some children have attention different not deficit.  These tendencies are the source of their brilliance, and their most problematic behavior.”

George and Joanne Barrie Lynn, authors of

Genius! Nurturing the Spirit of the Wild,

 Odd and Oppositional child

 

Also quoting from the book Genius!

“Autistic writer Temple Grandin suggests that people with Asperger’s Syndrome have a kind of creativity suited to their tendency to think in pictures.

“They are not good at following conventional rules to get to their results, but are powerfully visionary and will get new ideas as feeling-images.

“She profiles ALBERT EINSTEIN as someone with Asperger’s, recounting that he developed the theory of relativity from a vision he saw while pondering the relationship between mass and energy.”

 

(Who has not seen this EINSTEIN quote on a greeting card or poster:

 “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”).

 

 

“I honestly believe that as a result of my own bipolar disorder I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more and have been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs for all the winters.’

Kay Redfield Jamison from Touched With Fire

 

 

“So neurotics and psycohoneurotics are a mine of social treasure. If their emotionality, talents, interests and sensitivity were discovered at an early age, society and science would profit.”

Psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski

 

“I shudder and I sigh to think that even Cicero and many-minded Homer were mad as the mist and snow.”

W.B. Yates

 

 

“And by a strange alchemy of brain

His pleasure always turned to pain –

His naiveté to wild desire-

His wit to love – his wine to fire –

And so, being young and dipt in folly

I fell in love with melancholy.”

Edgar Alan Poe

 

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;

There is a rapture on the lonely shore;

There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea and music in its roar:

I love man not the less but nature more.”

George Gordon Lord Byron

 

“To see a world in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of you hand

And eternity in an hour.”

William Blake

 

“We dance around in a ring and suppose,

But the secret sits in the middle and knows.”

Robert Frost

 

“Forgive,oh Lord, my little jokes on thee and I’ll forgive thy great ones on me”

Robert Frost