Daily Inspiration Quote by Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky is selling a stubborn, almost unromantic idea of creativity: inspiration is less lightning bolt than muscle memory. The line’s first move is bluntly physical. Appetite “comes by eating” turns desire into a bodily feedback loop, not a mystical gift. By pairing hunger with inspiration, he reframes the artist’s problem from “Do I feel like it?” to “Have I begun?” That’s a composer talking, and not the swoony, tortured-genius type. Stravinsky’s public persona was famously anti-sentimental, suspicious of Romantic self-mythology, and this quote doubles as a jab at the cult of the muse.

The subtext is disciplinary, even moral: you don’t wait to be chosen by inspiration; you earn it through procedure. “If inspiration is not discernible at the beginning” concedes the common panic of the blank page, then refuses to elevate it. It’s permission to start cold. For a modern audience conditioned to treat motivation as a prerequisite, Stravinsky flips the dependency: motivation is often the product, not the input.

Context matters. Writing and speaking in the wake of late-Romantic excess and alongside modernism’s emphasis on craft, structure, and constraint, Stravinsky championed form as a generator of feeling. His own methods were famously workmanlike: sketches, revisions, systems. The intent isn’t to diminish inspiration but to demystify it, to relocate creative authority from mood to practice. In an age that monetizes “passion” as branding, Stravinsky offers a harder, oddly liberating promise: show up, and the wanting may follow.