“I feel grateful to the happy chance which forced me to compose freely and in silence, and has thus delivered me from the tyranny of the fingers, so dangerous to thought.”

— Hector Berlioz , Mémoires

Je ne puis m'empêcher de rendre grâces au hasard qui m'a mis dans la nécessité de parvenir à composer silencieusement et librement, en me garantissant ainsi de la tyrannie des habitudes des doigts, si dangereuses pour la pensée.
On being unable to master the piano.
Source: Mémoires (1870), Ch. 4, p. 14

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Mémoires (1870)

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Hector Berlioz 9

French Romantic composer 1803–1869

John Fowles book The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“Shelter me from the powder
And the finger
Cover me with the thought
That pulled the trigger
Think of me
As one you'd never figured
Would fade away so young
With so much left undone.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Powderfinger
Song lyrics, Rust Never Sleeps (1978)

“I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is “at play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been fortunate. Very fortunate.

“I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

“I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of sudden a thought occurred to me: If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Einstein in his Kyoto address (14 December 1922), talking about the events of "probably the 2nd or 3rd weeks" of October 1907, quoted in Why Did Einstein Put So Much Emphasis on the Equivalence Principle? by Dr. Robert J. Heaston http://www.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_23.pdf in Equivalence Principle – April 2008 (15th NPA Conference) who cites A. Einstein. “How I Constructed the Theory of Relativity,” Translated by Masahiro Morikawa from the text recorded in Japanese by Jun Ishiwara, Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies (AAPPS) Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 17-19 (April 2005)
1920s

“Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Original: (fr) Notre révolution m'a fait sentir tout le sens de l'axiome qui dit que l'histoire est un roman ; et je suis convaincu que la fortune et l'intrigue ont fait plus de héros, que le génie et la vertu.
Source: Lettres à ses commettants, 1ère série, n°10 http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/journaux/lettres_commettants/robespierre_lettres_commettants_1_10.htm, (21 December 1792)