Lawren Quotes & Sayings

Perhaps she was happiest when she was out of control. She looked at the fates and said three little words, not one regret. — Lawren Leo

I don't suppose you do know precisely what you are after. I don't think in the creative process anyone quite knows. They have a vague idea - a beckoning, an inkling of some truth - it is only in the process that it comes to any clarity. — Lawren Harris

Most people live their lives laying prostrate before a false god, waiting for a cue to rise. There are no cues, only decisions. Shall I have dessert? Shall I have the best of the wine? Shall I love the person next to me? They can all be brought to your table. Rise, I say, rise and look within to the truth, to the light, and tell it your decision. — Lawren Leo

She felt the adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez strumming at her inner thighs like a guitar, and then slowly moving upwards until it wrapped around her heart in its denouement. — Lawren Leo

On any given night the stars are endless losses or endless gains. One for the love you experience and one for the love you lose. One for the unfulfilled wish and one for the wish yet to come. — Lawren Leo

We were told, quite seriously, that there never would be a Canadian art because we had no art tradition. — Lawren Harris

I felt the strange brooding lonely presence of Nature fostering a new race, a new age, and as part of it, a new expression in Art. It was an unfolding of the heart itself through the effect of environment, of people, of place, and time. — Lawren Harris

No man can roan or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of awareness and his discipline in expression, is perhaps more understanding of its moods and spirit than others are. He is thus better equipped to interpret it to others, and then, when her has become one with its spirit, to create living works in their own right, by using forms, colors, rhythms and moods, to make a harmonious home for the imaginative and spiritual meaning it has evoked in him. — Lawren Harris

Purpose creates a belief in a higher power, directing you toward your goal on the best path possible. — Lawren Leo

The wind went mute and the trees in the forest stood still. It was time for the last tale. — Lawren Leo

Buried deep within each one of us lies a treasure. It is our mission in this lifetime to find this treasure, but its exact location is known only by the dragon that guards it. — Lawren Leo

For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can. — Lawren Harris

The power of beauty at work in man, as the artist has always known, is severe and exacting, and once evoked, will never leave him alone, until he brings his work and life into some semblance of harmony with its spirit. — Lawren Harris

We have the power to change voluntarily, and there is something wonderful and awe-inspiring about that power. — Lawren Leo

She remembered something she overheard at a dinner party -- Everyone loses their mind at least once in this lifetime. Everyone. — Lawren Leo

You see, Dr. Sherrington,' the devil said, 'we are more alike than you think.' He got up again on all fours looking in the direction of the voice. It was time to face the devil. — Lawren Leo

She looked at his face and saw a monk and a detective, both beautiful and bizarre. — Lawren Leo

Mind alone remains stable, and watches the chaos of phenomena, and knows that there is a plastic unity of existence - a changeless harmony - behind the everchanging. — Lawren Harris

Art is not an amusement, nor a distraction, nor is it, as many men maintain, an escape from life. On the contrary, it is a high training of the soul, essential to the soul's growth, to its unfoldment. — Lawren Harris

Creativity is at the root of excitement. — Lawren Leo

For a thought to manifest on the earth realm, a sacrifice must occur. — Lawren Leo

As she slid into her fifties, with grace I might add, she learned the art of hatred, pulling on the pain from a broken heart. She kept this pain alive, growing on the outskirts of her soul, like a copse of trees that constantly needed pruning. — Lawren Leo

Outside the store, beauty and mystery struggled to come together. Inside, they held hands, giggled to one another, and whispered secret messages. — Lawren Leo

Sometimes the presence of a happy moment, one that won't fade, is all the comfort we need. — Lawren Leo

Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure. — Lawren Harris

And light has no weight, / Yet one is lifted on its flood, /Swept high, /Running up white-golden light-shafts, /As if one were as weightless as light itself - /All gold and white and light. — Lawren Harris

She prayed to the gods of love and the gods of destruction, for they are one and the same. — Lawren Leo

Every time you use the Dragonflame philosophy, you refine your subtle body and stengthen your will by going through the process of separating the dross from the subtle and putting it back together again. Every time you follow this magical philosophy, you are doing what is know as the Great Work. In other words, every time you work magic using Dragonflame, you get closer to finding the Philosopher's Stone. — Lawren Leo

Because change creates opportunity, when we do it through purpose and awareness, we are working with the fates, and in turn they smile upon us. — Lawren Leo

Mother Earth allows us to live and to walk on her surface, not the other way around. — Lawren Leo

They kissed in the middle of the sidewalk, letting the crowds of people flow around them like water around an island. — Lawren Leo

The earth is a mosaic, and most fail to notice the gossamer tesserae floating down from the realm of the mind that form its images of beauty and horror. — Lawren Leo

When we set a goal we are fulfilling our destiny. Even if we do not reach it, we have changed our lives and the lives of others by attempting to reach it. — Lawren Leo

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling. — Lawren Harris

The thought of today cannot be expressed in the language of yesterday. — Lawren Harris

The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions. — Lawren Harris

It's probably hard for anyone looking at my landscapes today to realize that I was once regarded as a rebel, a dangerous influence; that I've been told I was on the verge of insanity, that my painting was nothing but meaningless daubs. Lawren Harris, the man most responsible for drawing the Group of Seven together, was accused of something perilously close to treason - his paintings, said his severest critics, were discouraging immigration. — A. Y. Jackson

Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life. — Lawren Harris

Strength, Confidence
Original Thought
I Seek You Out
Until Your Caught — Lawren Leo

Every spell is a journey. — Lawren Leo

The evening pulsed with omens gentle to the eyes, and Valentina had a romantic crush on it all, like every good witch should. — Lawren Leo

Jagged needle, wicked lies
From under the skin, pluck evil eyes.
Destiny change from pain and cold
Now that you pay in blood and soul. — Lawren Leo

Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout. — Lawren Harris

Art is the distillate of life, the winnowed result of the experience of a people, the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world; a world in which all ideas, thoughts, and forms are pure and beautiful and completely clear, the world Plato held to be perfect and eternal. All works that have in them an element of joy are records of this adventure. — Lawren Harris

And he ate up all her vision, as he had done the first day she saw him so long ago. — Lawren Leo

Visible nature is but a distorted reflection of a more perfect world and the creative individual viewing her is inspired to perceive within and behind her many garments, that which is timeless and entirely beautiful. — Lawren Harris

His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them — J.D. Salinger

The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age ... So the Canadian artist was drawn North. — Lawren Harris

It requires courage to face and to conquer the immense weight of inertia and the dead and dying traditions and sophistications that clutter the minds of men and mould them into the mimicry of living ways ... — Lawren Harris

There is a point where the universe can deliver you from the verge of regret. I know your love for me will take you there. — Lawren Leo

To Lawren Harris art was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving. — A. Y. Jackson

Beauty is a living abiding presence completely untouchable by all the devices of man, such as moral codes, creeds, intellectual analysis, games and cliches, the acquisitive instinct, or lust for anything whatsoever. — Lawren Harris

Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation: it changes us. — Lawren Harris

Only the ocean kept the same rhythm. Crashing in and slowly pulling back out, it never lied, never changed. It tried to teach them a life of romantic consistency. — Lawren Leo

The secret to excitement is discovering new paths, and having the courage to take them. — Lawren Leo

Sacred signs always come when your soul calls out in pain or joy. — Lawren Leo

The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them. — Lawren Harris

Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye - finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding wherein we have the capacity for universal response. — Lawren Harris

In the inner place where true artists create there exists a pure child. — Lawren Harris

Inspiration for my short stories grows from a psychic kernel, a vision of some sort or an eccentric, colorful dream. — Lawren Leo

Desire creates a starting point. Without it, no magic can be put into action. — Lawren Leo

If we are to wield great magic, then let us learn from great teachers: the alchemists -- magicians par excellence. — Lawren Leo

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside. — Lawren Harris

New material demands new methods, and new methods fling a challenge to old convention. — Lawren Harris

A confident decision makes a lasting goal. — Lawren Leo

Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead. — Lawren Leo

Are we taking the drunken drivers off the road only to turn them into drunken pedestrians? — Lawren Harris

So long as painting deals with objective nature, it is an impure art, for recognizability precludes the highest aesthetic emotion. All painting, ancient or modern, moves us aesthetically only in so far as it possesses a force over and beyond its aspect. — Lawren Harris

If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay of something we see outside of us with our inner response. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on canvas with paint so that when finished it contains the experience. — Lawren Harris

Hidden by diaphanous clouds of mist and fog floating gracefully over vales of heather and flowing runnels, she began to dance. — Lawren Leo

The Goddess is the macrocosmic and microcosmic anima, as put in place by Creator. Her existence became necessary in order to give form to Creator's thoughts and therefore ours as well. — Lawren Leo

Once a month, ripe with psychic energy, the moon grows to Her zenith. Blazing full with the sun's rays through the night sky, it is with great compassion and love for her children that she luminesces. — Lawren Leo

I myself incline to drift, to accept a lesser situation rather than strive for a greater, and yet, I know that character in life and art is only made by an effort that is quite beyond one's ordinary everyday acceptance of things as they are. — Lawren Harris

I inhale and a zephyr enters my body. The earth tilts its axis, changing my view of the heavens. Two clouds appear in the shape of trumpets. They part and rays of sunlight burst in. The sunlight speaks, 'Seek a new experience. — Lawren Leo

Creation and Free Will are constantly moving, hand in hand, like children traveling along a path full of impulses and inspirations.Through the use of the Dragonflame philosophy they become superior artistic beings able to enjoy and share the fruits of creative labor. — Lawren Leo

If the goal is what you want to achieve, then the purpose is why you want to achieve it. Without purpose, reaching your goal will have little or no meaning. — Lawren Leo