John Ortberg Quotes

What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.

Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.

If you want to write a novel, it's the Divine mind wanting to express.

I like to write about things that are dark or twisted. Where the poetry seems to be is when you start in the dark and reach for the light - that's what makes it not depressing to me.

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

Art is a reflection of God's creativity, an evidence that we are made in the image of God.

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.

Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.

One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.

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

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.

Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite.

The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on.

There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?

For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.

I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.

I'm glad . . . that Edison didn't give up on the light bulb. That Luther refused to back down. That Michelangelo kept painting. That Lindbergh kept flying.

Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.