Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.

I'd hate to compare art to life but I think a movie is an entity of its own, and when it's done, you want everybody to like it like you want everybody to like your children.

Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.

All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.

When I create art, it's like holding hands with God.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Art is... a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.

Art makes the spirit soar. And when the spirit is lifted, life follows.

Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.

Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

All the arts are brothers; each one is a light to the others.

The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of 'participation mystique' - to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual.

The making of art is no different than prayer.

I think your life informs your art.

If you deny yourself access to the child within because you're too serious, you also block your connection to the divine Light and your feminine self. Every creator who's any good uses their feminine side to create with.. Whether a scientist working on a hunch, a painter working on the interplay of colors, or a musician dealing with the juxtaposition of notes and chords.

In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art - not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.