Christianity And Art Quotes

It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' to regard 'Les Miserables' as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and 'The Scarlet Letter' as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn't mind. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited. ~ Stephen King

Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less! ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Current fashion magazines have become a form of entertainment, and in some cases bizarre art, showing women in outfits that the everyday woman would never wear. The fashion system has not and will never even attempt to teach us the skills and tools to honor our true nature and our unique physical traits so we can express our true beauty. ~ Carol Tuttle

My own life is wonderful, but if I had to live the life of someone else, I'd gladly choose that of Julia Child or Dr. Seuss: two outrageously original people, each of whom fashioned an idiosyncratic wisdom, passion for life, and sense of humor into an art form that anyone and everyone could savor. ~ Julia Glass

He orders a batch of handmade tiedyed shirts from Guizhou province and takes them to a graduate student at the Central Authority Fine Arts School to find out what to charge. The graduate student swings his long hair back and forth and tells Hao An these shirts are not authentic enough, not tribal enough. No way are young Beijingers going to be interested in them: there's no art, no attitude. "What should I do now then?" asks Hao An. The graduate student tells him to head to the bars in Sanlitun and sell them to drunken foreigners and pretentious businessmen with art collections. ~ Xiaolu Guo

an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive. ~ Paul Auster

Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it's easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see. ~ Catherine Lacey

The highest art is that which awakens our dormant will-force, and nerves us to face the trials of life manfully. All that brings drowsiness and makes us shut our eyes to reality around-on the mastery of which alone life depends�is a message of decay and death. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist's life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion. ~ Massimiliano Gioni

When we see religion split into so many thousand of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself.
[Letter to George Logan, 12 November 1816] ~ Thomas Jefferson

When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it ... ~ Walker Evans

What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair. ~ Aldous Huxley

I love you, Levi."
"Thank God for it because I love you too."
Her laugh was back in his house again. Her scent on his sheets.
Her crap on his bathroom counter and her stuff in the drawers in his armoire.
She lived in him and he had no plans to ever let that change.
It didn't matter that she was younger than he was. All that mattered was that she loved him and he loved her. The rest they could work out as time passed. She'd keep him in line. Decorate their house and fill it with music and love. And one day with children.
They had time, he realized. Time to be in love and be engaged. Time for her art and his job, time for weddings and honeymoons and nesting. She was his, forever. As deeply as he was hers.
Made the groveling worth it.

~~Sway ~ Lauren Dane

All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue--or in any ad for lingerie--where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed. Lingerie ads and storytelling balance the veiled and the unveiled, the seen and the unseen, the shown and the about-to-be-shown. In short, it is the art of the tease, the craft of selective 'coverage,' that, not just in lingerie but in storytelling, works to enthrall. ~ Julie Checkoway

Combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important. ~ Robert Adams

Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the wastes, waiting for no one to surface.

It's a white man who's missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed.

If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Your art is part of the big painting of your life. You are on your own, standing by yourself in the middle of creation. In the beauty of that aloneness, and in how you respond to it, you will find your passion. ~ Michele Cassou

Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you'll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It's a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way - by poking. ~ Seth Godin

But one aspect of Revelation must not be allowed to exclude or to obscure another; and Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love, and it is fear. ~ John Henry Newman

He knew many things now that he had not known only a short time earlier. He knew that despite all the good things happening now, John would still miss his parents, and Violet and her family would still miss her brother, and Nicholas would miss having John at the Manor, and when Viloet went away to art school, he would miss her, too.
'Nothing's easy,' Nicholas thought, sneaking glances at his friends, who were serving themselves more pie. 'But some things help. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

Success and the art of making music are two different things for me. ~ Norah Jones

This is the land of dreamings, a land of wide horizons and secret places. The first people, our ancestors, created this country in the culture that binds us to it. ~ Hetti Perkins

About the only good thing about being sex-starved and hornier than the blue wildebeest in mating season she'd once had to write an essay on, was the vast improvement on her pen-pal repertoire. Phone sex? Pah! Any schmuck could talk dirty and get off on it. The art of airmail sex, however, presented a much greater challenge and one she'd excelled at, if Mark's responses were anything to go by. It was a wonder the planes didn't catch fire. ~ Allie A. Burrow

You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it. ~ Freya Stark

Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be ... ~ Antoine Lavoisier

All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed. ~ William Wiley

I fully intend to preach the word of God to you until there's a difference between how you walk out of here and how you walked in here. ~ T.D. Jakes

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, edu- cate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art. ~ James Felici

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point. ~ Brian De Palma

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one - my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art - the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry - and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important ~ Erich Fromm

To practice Aikido fully you must calm the spirit and go back to the origin. ~ Morihei Ueshiba

Most talk of a catholic spirit but it is only till they have been brought into the pale of their own church. This is downright sectarianism, not Catholicism. How can I act consistently, unless I receive and love all the children of God, whom I esteem to be such, of whatever denomination they may be? ~ George Whitefield

On all the walls, wherever walls exist, I will inscribe this eternal indictment of Christianity
I have letters to make even blindmen see ... I call Christianity the single great curse, the single great innermost depravity, the single great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, secretive, subterranean, small enough
I call it mankind's single immortal blemish ... And we reckon time from the dies nefastus with which this calamity arose
following Christianity's first day!
Why not following its last day, instead?
Following today?
Transvaluation of all values! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Immodest and attractive is easy. Modest and repulsive is easy too. But modest and attractive is an art form. ~ Douglas Wilson

. Christianity is marketed as a religion of love and tolerance, but inwardly it is a destructive virus that causes division, promotes willful ignorance and retards intellectual growth. ~ Al Stefanelli

The art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses. ~ Barbara Kruger

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth. ~ Oliver Sacks

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere. ~ Tom Turner