Sermon quotes on art
Maya Angelou
All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.
Letter to My Daughter (New York; Random House, 2008), p.65.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.
Report to Greco, Faber & Faber, 1961, p.150.
Iris Murdoch
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture.
“Metaphysics and Ethics,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 75.
Paul Valéry
A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.
Essay: The Cemetery by the Sea
Pablo Picasso
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Seneca
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Taken from On the Tranquility of the Mind
Vincent van Gogh
When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion, then I go out and paint the stars.
Letter 164, in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Robert Harrison, trans. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1991).
Dorothy Sayers
The disastrous and widening cleavage between the Church and the Arts on the one hand and between the State and the Arts on the other leaves the common man with the impression that the artist is something of little account, either in this world or the next; and this has had a bad effect on the artist, since it has left him in a curious spiritual isolation. Yet with all his faults, he remains the person who can throw the most light on that “creative attitude to life” to which bewildered leaders of thought are now belatedly exhorting a no less bewildered humanity.
The Mind of the Maker, Harper Collins, 1941, 1987, 214.
Dorothy Sayers
To write the poem… is an act of love toward the poet’s own imaginative act and toward his fellow beings.
The Mind of the Maker
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