Patti Smith Quotes

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

All art worthy of the name is religious.

As Buddhists, statues are more than simply pieces of stone to us. We believe the statue of the Buddha has a kind of soul and is the Buddha in some sense. This is why we can pray to it. Clay is a very interesting and fundamental material - it's earth, it's water and - with fire - it takes on form and life. In fact, what is art? Art is giving to what you create a soul. That's why it is said God is like an artist.

Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.

Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory.

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.

You're a song written by the hands of God.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

All the great works of art, the cathedrals - the Gothic cathedrals and the splendid Baroque churches - are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.

Painting is saying "Ta" to God.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

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.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

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

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,--on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion.

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual...

Faith is not belief, it is the grasp on the Ultimate, an illumination.

Thus does the Muse herself move men divinely inspired, and through them thus inspired a Chain hangs together of others inspired divinely likewise.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to 'content' is like praying in swear words. End of Sermon. Back to business.

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.

There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

People for whom art is religion can say, "What I love about art is that it points to a higher reality." Well, fine, but the time comes when the smart thing for such a person to do is to let go of the fun of the art and get into the hard work of attaining and understanding that higher reality, unmixed with worldly games.