Willa Cather Quotes

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.

All art worthy of the name is religious.

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.

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.

When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry

When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that.

I think a lot of bands are influenced by religious symbolism and not even necessarily Christianity or Catholicism.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.

Art is kind of the lens through which I think about God.

Like Love, Art ties together all the great sacred traditions because they all used creative expression, or we wouldn't know about them.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Do you know what good art is? It is saying "ta" to God.

A work becomes a work of art when one re-evaluates the values of nature and adds one's own spirituality.

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.