In this world, modern artists are a sort of spiritual underground.

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)

Painting is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

Colour is light, and light is the manifestation of creation. Without light there would be no life, and no existence. Light, in fact, is the primary witness of creation.

Edgar Cayce, Auras

A drawing is the gushing forth of an awakening spirit.

Georges Rouault (1871-1958)

You are not on this planet to produce anything with your body. You are on this planet to produce something with your soul. Your body is simply and merely the tool of your soul. Your mind is the power that makes the body go. So what you have here is a power tool, used in the creation of the soul’s desire.

Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God, book 1

Painting is a state of being…

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)

I saw shapes on the ceiling…

Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

John Lennon

I believe that any kind of transcendence, spirituality or redemption, starts with the ordinary.

Sean Scully (b.1945)

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

Andre Gide (1869-1951)

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

John Lennon

Spiritual truth must be lived in practical life to change everyday experience.

Neal Donald Walsch, Conversations with God, book 2

To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, New York Times, 1943

If I am searching for my spirituality, passionately, I must begin with me.

Jill Scott, One Is The Magic #

Dreams are like the paints of a great artist. Your dreams are your paints, the world is your canvas. Believing, is the brush that converts your dreams into a masterpiece of reality.

Pablo Picasso

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

John Lennon

I sit for two or three hours and then in fifteen minutes I can do a painting, but that’s part of it. You have to get ready and decide to jump up and do it.

Cy Twombly (b.1928), Cycles and Seasons

Faith removes limitation.

Napoleon Hill

It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand….It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art.

Rindy Sam, after she kissed one panel of Twombly’s triptych Phaedrus, 2007

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

John Lennon

I am basically a poet who turned out badly.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

I think with painting you can get rid of the problem of time. You can feel it abstracted in the rhythms, in the layers of the painting, but you are, for a moment, free.

Sean Scully (b.1945)

[For Mitchell] painting is like music – it is beyond life and death. It is another dimension.

Gisèle Barreau (b.1948)

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

John Lennon

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Albert Einstein

There has never been such a fish.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

The progression of a painter’s work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity. toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea. and the idea and the observer. To achieve this clarity is inevitably to be understood.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

The love of colour has to be real. In fact like love.

Sir Terry Frost (1915-2003)

Love comes very near to translating one’s thought impulses into their spiritual equivalent.

Napoleon Hill

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliché that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

John Lennon

You’re confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they’re talking about product. That’s not art, that’s the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I’m not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994

“Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings.”

Wassily Kandinsky

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954), O Magazine, April 2003

[Mahatma] Gandhi wielded more potential power than any man living in his time, and this despite the fact that he had none of the orthodox tools of power, such as money, battleships, soldiers and materials of warfare.

Napoleon Hill

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

John Lennon

As the world has become more technological, a human need for mystery and the individually authentic experience has become more desperate.

Sean Scully (b.1945)

Simply want nothing. Have preferences, but no needs. Yet this is a very high state of being: it is the place of Masters.

Neal Donald Walsch, Conversations with God, book 2