Wendy Beckett Quotes & Sayings

There is no life without work, anxieties or tensions. Peace is not found in avoiding these but in understanding them and controlling their force. — Wendy Beckett

We were created to be fully human - a lifetime effort - and using our minds intelligently and reverently is essential to full humanhood. But Rushdie talks throughout of making something sacred, whereas there is another kind of sacrality that exists of its own right. — Wendy Beckett

Prejudice is always dangerous. — Wendy Beckett

If continually people look and look and always come away enriched, then it's a great work — Wendy Beckett

A work of art is great to the extent that to encounter it is to be changed. — Wendy Beckett

God never sends suffering. Never. It is never "God's will" that we should suffer. God would like us not to suffer. But since the world brings suffering, and since God refuses to use His almighty power and treat us as foolish children, He aligns Himself with us, goes into Auschwitz with us, is devastated by 9/11 with us, and draws us with Him through it all into fulfillment. This is a high price to pay for our human freedom, but it is worth it. To be mere automatons for whom God arranges the world to cause us no suffering would mean we never have a self. We could not make choices. — Wendy Beckett

Again and again I've taken quick glances and then for some reason I've got to sit before a picture waiting and it's opened up like one of those Japanese flowers that you put into water and something I thought wasn't worth more than a casual, respectful glance begins to open up depth after depth of meaning. — Wendy Beckett

Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us. — Wendy Beckett

We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us. — Wendy Beckett

The dream world, the true freedom of the imagination, does not open to self-conscious manipulation. — Wendy Beckett

Looking at art is one way of listening to God. — Wendy Beckett

A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor ... Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom. — Wendy Beckett

All great art is a visual form of prayer. — Wendy Beckett

You are not a saint because you keep the rules and are blameless; you are a saint if you live in the real world, going out and loving the real people God has put into your life. — Wendy Beckett

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself. — Wendy Beckett

Although we cannot command it, we choose joy, making a deliberate commitment to happiness (essentially another word for peace). — Wendy Beckett

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you. — Wendy Beckett

All in Dali is indeed contrived, a brilliant illustration of his own psyche as he understands it, as opposed to how it truly may have been. — Wendy Beckett

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance. — Wendy Beckett

Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs. — Wendy Beckett