Writing Tools

A reader asks me how I am able to produce so many posts and if I ever suffer from writer’s block.  The answer is that I rarely experience writer’s block. If anything I may find myself to be unhappy with the quality of the writing, but coming up with material is easy. One of the ways that I do that is by using quotes and or music as prompts/inspiration.

Music of course offers the benefit of providing the actual sound. beat and rhythm as well as lyrics. Here are some of the many quotes that I like to use for my writing. (Editor’s Note: This post will be updated. Check back soon)

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion –
I have shudder’d at it.
I shudder no more.
I could be martyr’d for my religion
Love is my religion
And I could die for that.
I could die for you.
~ by John Keats ~

I’d like to run away
From you,
But if you didn’t come
And find me …
I would die.
~ by Shirley Bassey ~

You will never know true happiness
until you have truly loved,
and you will never understand
what pain really is
until you have lost it.
~ by Anonymous ~

The most precious possession that ever comes
To a man in this world
Is a woman’s heart.
~ by Josiah G. Holland ~

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
~ by Mark Twain ~

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
~ by Ray Bradbury ~

Never, never, never, never give up.
~ by Winston Churchill ~

Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts the opponent’s pressure, and the temporary failures.
~ by Vince Lombardi ~

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare- Sonnet 18

If thou remember’st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved.
(As You Like It, 2.4.33-5)

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(5.5.30), Macbeth

“A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.”

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

“Give all to love; obey thy heart.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

Teddy Roosevelt

“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Teddy Roosevelt “Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
Samuel Johnson