Daily Inspiration Quote by Igor Stravinsky

A slap in the face to the polite myth of originality, Stravinsky’s line is both a provocation and a confession. Coming from a composer who built modernism out of friction with the past - Russian folk motifs, Baroque structures, Classical balance, jazz rhythm - it reads less like a permission slip for plagiarism than a manifesto for how culture actually moves: by taking.

“Borrow” suggests etiquette: a visible debt, a hat-tip, a safe influence that leaves the source intact. “Steal,” in Stravinsky’s framing, is transformational. It means absorbing a material so completely that it stops functioning as a reference and becomes a building block in a new language. The subtext is ruthless: if your influence is still recognizable as someone else’s property, you haven’t done the real work yet. You’re decorating yourself with taste, not making art.

Context matters. Stravinsky’s career unfolded in an era obsessed with breaking tradition while secretly feeding on it. The avant-garde sold rupture; the practice was remix. His neoclassical phase, in particular, looks like “theft” performed openly - not copying Mozart, but metabolizing the idea of Mozart into something leaner, sharper, and emotionally cooler. The intent is to puncture moral panic about influence and replace it with a criterion: greatness is measured by what you can do with what came before.

It’s also strategic rhetoric. By reframing appropriation as artistic courage, Stravinsky defends his own method and dares successors to stop being reverent. The line endures because it flatters ambition while warning that imitation is not homage; it’s camouflage.