Uninspired Quotes

There certainly are situations where I feel not empowered or uninspired. Particularly when the person's agenda is to intimidate through abusing their position or their authority. When I am present and in a nonreactive state, then I can become like snake and slide through their "intimidation net" back into the creative plane. When I am in a reactive state, I usually regret responding, because usually all that happens is that the intimidator feels righteously vindicated. ~ Tori Amos

Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired ~ Richard Kemp

He liked too the specific and unexpected companionability of the place. There were times on the weekends when everyone was there at the same time, and at moments, he would emerge from the fog of his painting and sense that all of them were breathing in rhythm, panting almost, from the effort of concentrating. He could feel, then, the collective energy they were expending filling the air like gas, flammable and sweet, and would wish he could bottle it so that he might be able to draw from it when he was feeling uninspired, for the days in which he would sit in front of the canvas for literally hours, as though if he stared long enough, it might explode into something brilliant and charged. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn't until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.
Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime.
I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn't until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me. ~ Osamu Dazai

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch ~ Kathy Fish

Imagine the literary buff, steeped in his beloved classics, rejoicing in a memory that sings, prepared to dispense kilowatts of goodwill, who fetches up at the Odeon on an off day. There are days like that, when everything rings hollow, and even the hollowness is unconvincing. There's nothing to be done about it: the inspiration's not there. He's left with a terrible sense of disappointment, resentment, against whom he doesn't exactly know: the playwright or the actors? All he can do is curl up in bed, alone, all alone, and console himself with suitably wrought alexandrines. ~ Jacques Yonnet

Oh my, I've just discovered what science shows us about our humble but spectacular place in the universe, and I have to say: it is thrilling and mind-boggling beyond all imaginings! It makes the Bible so puny and uninspired, and certainly less poetic, by comparison. I'm terribly sorry. I sincerely misunderstood so much. I almost wish there were a God so I could be punished for all the suffering I have obliviously caused in the world. But since there will be no cosmic punishment for me, I will spend what time I have left working in a family planning clinic in Latin America. Good day. ~ Julia Sweeney

An uninspired mind creates a lack of energy for the body, resulting in a lack of performance filled with excuses. ~ Farshad Asl

Belief comes spontaneously as well as by effort. Belief is power. An insincere and uninspired seeker is aware of the truth that belief is power, but he cannot go beyond understanding or awareness; whereas a sincere, genuine, devoted and surrendered seeker knows that belief is dynamic power, and he has this power as his very own. ~ Sri Chinmoy

To be ignorant of one's own ignorance is to be in an unprogressive, uninspired state of existence. ~ David O. McKay

Use the knowledge gained and the lessons learned to practice being compassionate with yourself as you take the courageous steps to move forward.

While you're at it, tie a big knot in the uninspired words coming from the negative voices in and around you. ~ Leonie H. Mattison

Vin was coming to realize that her old goal in life - simply staying alive - was uninspired. There was so much more she could be doing. ~ Brandon Sanderson

There are jokes about breast surgeons.
You know-- something like-- I've seen more breasts in this city than--
I don't know the punch line.
There must be a punch line.

I'm not a man who falls in love easily. I've been faithful to my
wife. We fell in love when we were twenty-two. We had plans. There
was justice in the world. There was justice in love. If a person was
good enough, an equally good person would fall in love with that
person. And then I met-- Ana. Justice had nothing to do with it.

There once was a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was
married to a nurse. He loved her-- immeasurably. One day Halsted
noticed that his wife's hands were chapped and red when she came back
from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is
one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between
inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.

When I met Ana, I knew:
I loved her to the point of invention. ~ Sarah Ruhl

architecture to spiritually uplift and thought it was a very bad idea to build functional, uninspired blocks of flats that would depress both their inhabitants and society at large. And, ~ Menna Van Praag

If God himself was not willing to use coercion to force man to accept certain religious views, man, uninspired and liable to error, ought not to use the means that Jehovah would not employ. ~ William Jennings Bryan

I'm contemplating moving to London for a period of time. I've been in Los Angeles for 15 years and I'm really tired of it. I'm continually uninspired by what's being sent to me. Even by huge films that they're doing there. They're just awful. ~ Sherilyn Fenn

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self - never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. ~ George Eliot

Having a gun held to your head helped sort out the big things in life from the little. So, some stranger's opinion of me given in the form of an uninspired insult? Not a big deal. ~ Kylie Scott

When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don't have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It's like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic. My stories are located in a dark, dangerous part of my consciousness, I feel the poison in my mind, but I can fend off a high dose of it because I have a strong body. When you are young, you are strong; so you can usually conquer the poison even without being in training. But beyond the age of 40 your strength wanes, you can no longer cope with the poison if you lead an unhealthy life. ~ Haruki Murakami

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

When I am tired, it is easy to believe that my exhaustion is the reason I am depressed and lonely and uninspired. But when I am well-rested, I can realize that these negative feelings are not a result of too little sleep. They are a result of my being a miserable, hopeless, misanthropic wretch. ~ John S. Hall

Life is sometimes to be watched as a retarded bird, uninspired by it. It may indeed be threaded, not as a precision course but as an affirmation of its own undoing. ~ Dew Platt

E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. ~ Nick Harkaway

History deals with situations and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance - glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an uninspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack. Under no circumstances can either of them be accused of wrongdoing or deceiving the public, however incongruous their efforts. They write well or badly, and there the matter ends. The historian, who fails in his duty, deceives the reader and wrongs the dead. ~ Norman Douglas

You have to leave the window open for better classeas to come along as you go. You can't grow too proud of your script. You have to let the thing shape itself. It guarantees the best classeas will always be used and it also keeps you from going braindead. If you grow bored and uninspired working on something, the audience will be able to tell. ~ Don Hertzfeldt

For me the major turning point in my working life was when I figured out that the work I produced when I felt inspired wasn't any different from the work I produced when I felt uninspired
at least a few months later. I think that "inspiration" has to do with your own confidence in your ideas, your blood sugar, the external pressures in your life, and a million other factors only tangentially related to the actual quality of the work. If creative work makes you sane and happy (and if it supports you financially), it's terrible to harness it to something you can't control, like "inspiration"
it sucks to only be happy when something you can't control occurs. ~ Cory Doctorow

I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I dreamed Kim Kardashian was sobbing but her makeup was still flawless. She stood on stage in a tight little cleavage squishing dress holding her award in her arms. Her out of focus, uninspired photograph of sunflowers and bluebonnets won Photograph of the Year in her church's photography contest. I was kind of bitter about it but I didn't attend her church and I didn't enter the contest. ~ Misti Rainwater-Lites

Will's fleshy face contorted and a memory swept over him like a chilling wind. He did
not move slowly over the past, it was all there in one flash, all of the years, a picture, a feeling and a despair, all stopped the way a fast camera stops the world. There was the flashing Samuel, beautiful as dawn with a fancy like a swallow's flight, and the brilliant, brooding Tom who was dark fire, Una who rode the storms, and the lovely Mollie, Dessie of laughter, George handsome and with a sweetness that filled a room like the perfume of flowers, and there was Joe, the youngest, the beloved. Each one without effort brought some gift into the family.
Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering. He thought of himself as slow, doltish, conservative, uninspired. No great dream lifted him high and no despair forced self-destruction. He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had - care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn't even know they needed him. He had the ability to get money and to keep it. He thought the Hamiltons despised him for his one ability. He had loved them doggedly, had always been at hand with his money to pull them out of their errors. He thought they were ashamed of him, and he fought bitt ~ John Steinbeck

Movies have kind of become a tad bit uninspired, in that the big studio movies are spending more money to chase the big money with all these franchises and superhero movies. Some of them have been great, but some of them are a little tiresome. ~ Mark Wahlberg

Fashion isn't interesting when it comes from an uninspired place. It's like voodoo; we don't want things that are soaked in blood, sweat, and tears. I adore life, and I'm very easygoing - and it shows in my work. ~ Christian Louboutin

I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been traveling for two million years?

If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars?

Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by the Creator of all worlds.

Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts, and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an uninspired barbarian.

I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he believed to be true -- that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired -- did not pretend that the story had been told to him by Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them.

After I had lear ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

This dog is quite similar to me. He doesn't care that much and sleeps all the time. ~ Choi Youngjae

But I would never insult the people that love this music and I would never insult the blessing of music in my life and I would never insult myself by playing uninspired music. ~ Ben Harper

I'm often wary of using the word 'inspiration' to introduce my work
it sounds too much like a sun shower from the heavens, absorbed by a passive individual enjoying an especially receptive moment. While that may be the case on rare occasions, the reality is usually far more prosaic. Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing. ~ Shaun Tan

If you can shoot well, all you need is a disposable, toy camera or a camera phone to create great work. If you're not talented, it doesn't matter if you buy a Nikon D3X or Leica; your work will still be uninspired. ~ Ken Rockwell

If you can help it, do not die bored or uninspired ~ Malebo Sephodi

I started taking classes and doing things that I had always wanted to do but couldn't because I was working. I signed up for a bunch of workout classes, and to my surprise, I realized I was enjoying it. Because I was working out so much, I started looking for more workout clothes and found a lot of redundancy - predictability that was uninspired. That's when I decided to start my own line. ~ Dayna Devon

Music journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met. ~ Zachary Cole Smith

Perhaps Dexter's dutiful but uninspired brain pictured him as Sherlock Holmes, able to examine the wheel ruts and deduce that a left-handed hunchback with red hair and a limp had gone down the road carrying a Cuban cigar and a ukulele. I would find no clues, not that it mattered. ~ Jeff Lindsay

Each step may seem to take forever, but no matter how uninspired you feel, continue to follow your practice schedule precisely and consistently. This is how we can use our greatest enemy, habit, against itself. ~ Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche

On the bright side," he went on, gesturing to the massive quantities of alcohol they had laid out on the table for their lackeys, "You get to drink loads of expensive whiskey, instead." "I don't like whiskey," Tyson told him. "I like steak knives." "Poddite," Slade sighed. Tyson squinted at him. "What?" "Poddite," Slade said, carefully arranging his plastic cutlery. "It means that your uninspired tastes mark you as one of the mindless ranks of pod-people that mechanically wander this earth, doing whatever their television or personal devices tell them to, like drinking piss because it's been marketed as 'refreshing.'" ~ Sara King

If I'm ever feeling uninspired, all I have to do is go see Exodus or Arch Enemy, and think 'Oh yeah, that's what we're doing this for.' ~ Kerry King

Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering. He thought of himself as slow, doltish, conservative, uninspired. No great dream lifted him high and no despair forced self destruction. He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had - care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the
undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn't even know they needed him. He had the
ability to get money and to keep it. He thought the Hamiltons despised him for his one ability. He had
loved them doggedly, had always been at hand with his money to pull them out of their errors. He thought they were ashamed of him, and he fought bitterly for their recognition. All of this was in the frozen wind that blew through him. ~ John Steinbeck

To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the New York 'Daily News,' and on 130 occasions while talking to 'The New York Times' during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse. ~ Zoe Kazan

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Section 1

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their person ~ Thomas Jefferson

An uninspired ruler works to develop those relationships which will be most to his advantage. A great ruler determines the most desirable relationships and assumes them into being. ~ C.S. Friedman

We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving ... We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins ... We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers ... We are the daughters of the feminists who said, "You can be anything," and we heard, "You have to be everything. ~ Courtney Martin

The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. ~ Sarah Ruhl

Help me, Lord, in times when I am uninspired to see things differently. ~ Jennifer Allwood

The wondrous moment of our meeting...
Still I remember you appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In hopeless ennui surrounding
The worldly bustle, to my ear
For long your tender voice kept sounding,
For long in dreams came features dear.

Time passed. Unruly storms confounded
Old dreams, and I from year to year
Forgot how tender you had sounded,
Your heavenly features once so dear.

My backwoods days dragged slow and quiet --
Dull fence around, dark vault above --
Devoid of God and uninspired,
Devoid of tears, of fire, of love.

Sleep from my soul began retreating,
And here you once again appear
Before me like a vision fleeting,
A beauty's angel pure and clear.

In ecstasy my heart is beating,
Old joys for it anew revive;
Inspired and God-filled, it is greeting
The fire, and tears, and love alive. ~ Alexander Pushkin

There is no such thing as a lazy person; he is either sick or uninspired. ~ Zig Ziglar

I didn't mind being in school. But I was usually uninspired and always late. I did what I had to, but not more. ~ Robyn

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable," ... you know'. ~ Stephen Fry

An inspired and infallible passage whose meaning you cannot be sure of is not much more useful than an uninspired, fallible passage. ~ Robert M. Price

Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them. ~ Nathan Hill

To be jealous of money is uninspired ... You can only be jealous of someone who has something that you can never have. More style, for example, or wit. Money is easily earned. ~ Cristina Alger

Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.

The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat. ~ Shaun Tan

The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity. ~ Norman Cousins