Religion Art Quotes & Sayings

A singular confusion exists about the notions of 'culture' and 'civilization'.
Culture began with the 'prologue in heaven.' With its religion, art, ethics, and philosophy, it will always be dealing with man's relation to that heaven from whence he came. Everything within culture means a confirmation or a rejection, a doubt or a reminiscence of the heavenly origin of man. Culture is characterized by this enigma and goes on through all time with the steady striving to solve it.
On the other hand, civilization is a continuation of the zoological, one-dimensional life, the material exchange between man and nature. This aspect of life differs from other animals' lives, but only in its degree, level, and organization. Here, one does not find man embarrassed by evangelical, Hamletian, or Karamasovian problems. The anonymous member of society functions here only by adopting the goods nature and changing the world by his work according to his needs. — Alija Izetbegovic

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all. — Vivian Gornick

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator
the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts. — Herbert Marcuse

If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally. — Angelus Silesius

I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion. — Julian Schnabel

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion to say nothing of the shape of his sentences are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness. — Jacques Barzun

Meditation is the art of cleaning your mirror from all the dust that the society, the religion, the educational system has poured on you, to take away everything that has not been born with you, to bring you to your absolute innocence as you were born as a child. — Rajneesh

I like religion and art because they know they are servants to life; I hate science and philosophy because they think they are its masters. — Raheel Farooq

Art, science, philosophy, religion
each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience. — Edward Abbey

Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication ... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century. — Abraham Kuyper

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology ... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all-pervading instability, had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to recognise it. I begin to understand now what heaven must be-and, oh! the grandeur and repose of the words-"The same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." Everlasting! "From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God." That sky above me looks as though it could not change, and yet it will. I am so tired-so tired of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually. I am in the mood in which women of another religion take the veil. I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthy monotony. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Tea with us became more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. — Okakura Kakuzo

And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat. — Michael Chabon

Science and art are the handmaids of religion. — Francois Delsarte

Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless. — Honore De Balzac

He knew Kandinsky by heart: every trickle of red, slash of black ink, and hemorrhage of gold. Each dissonant note in its allegro, the harmony in its adagio, and its deep blue intermezzo, formed a symphony he had memorized in his body. He couldn't say if Fragment 2 symbolized the Deluge, the Last Judgment, or the Resurrection. But it had become his religion, offering both redemption and pain.. — Kelly Oliver

Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas. — Semen Frank

Religion can only dream to do what science and art does every day. — Reggie Watts

I'm really happy with all the art that was inspired by religion, and I think I'd be tickled to little tiny pieces if art in the future was inspired by other things. — Penn Jillette

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual - this freedom is necessary for the individual. — Reinhold Niebuhr

I may not, perhaps, be forgiven for introducing sober matters with a frivolous notion, but the problem of making sense out of the seeming chaos of experience reminds me of my childish desire to send someone a parcel of water in the mail. The recipient unties the string, releasing the deluge in his lap. But the game would never work, since it is irritatingly impossible to wrap and tie a pound of water in a paper package. There are kinds of paper which won't disintegrate when wet, but the trouble is to get the water itself into any manageable shape, and to tie the string without bursting the bundle.

The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics and economics, in art, philosophy, and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at the impossible and futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages. — Alan W. Watts

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that. — Krista Tippett

I remember when we had to pick our major freshman year, I chose comparative religion. It came to me out of the blue. I am amazed at how interested I still am in those ideas, especially the way spirituality is expressed in the world and in art. — Amy Brenneman

Art is about cosmic beauty. Science is about cosmic order. Religion is about cosmic purpose. — Paul G

The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people
including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh
struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124) — David N. Elkins

I have never looked to religion for comfort - belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking - childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting - I thought this was what prayer must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want. Reading MtAoFC was like reading pornographic Bible verses. — Julie Powell

Science is a thought process that can be proven or disproven. Whereas philosophy, religion, art . . . ?' He shrugged again, dismissively. 'With those areas of thought, everyone's opinion is considered valid. No one, therefore is "wrong". Which logically means no one is right. It's circular thinking that gets no one anywhere. — Alex Scarrow

Art and religion have the same origin. Art first, or religion first? Maybe consciousness first! Consciousness always comes with religious feeling and artistic identification. It's the same origin. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. — Gregory Bateson

Religions can be lethal. If they are for you, there is an antidote. It's called faith, which has nothing to do with religion. What's the point of having faith in religion? Better to have faith in the Creator of all faith. — Art Hochberg

I have no problem with religion, and I grew up with a strong curiosity about spiritual matters, but my searching took me away from church and community worship to the internal journey. Before my recovery began, I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. — Eric Clapton

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life"). — Kazimir Malevich

Homosexuality is the most beautiful aspect of humanity. For its existence is proof that altruism is natural; it is to demonstrate that the theory of the "survival of the fittest" can only apply to the species as a whole, and that reproduction is insufficient to secure our place in the great jungle of life, which means being nice is a more stable evolutionary strategy than making kids; and if the homosexual is attracted to religion or to art - or, in smaller societies, to shamanism or caring for other people's children - is this not due to his or her search for purpose? If so, then what we call purpose must be something that encompasses all modes of life. What we call love must be greater than child rearing or caring for a mate. — Anthony Marais

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals. — Lewis Mumford

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere. — Huston Smith

A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity. — Edward Abbey

My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another. — Art Linkletter

Art is not a job for an artist, just as religion is not a job for a priest." He runs his fingers through his hair again. "Sometimes I see myself as almost like an academic. My artworks are not really products; they are papers that you write when you have finalized a strain of thought. — Sarah Thornton

All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations. — Arthur Koestler

There is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning - if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment. — Freeman Patterson

Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that. — Samuel R. Delany

We live in secular world now, but most of our art and culture is rooted in religion. — James Norton

"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention. — Andre Gide

As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it? I have pondered this pin unceasingly, yet cannot fathom it. We evidently lack the work for an object like this. So you are right, Robert. It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world — Philip K. Dick

He who has art and science also has religion, but those who do not have them better have religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I believe that one of the most important properties of a work of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites, and in their fusion to achieve a 'wholeness' or 'oneness,' the experiencing of which should be revelatory - both for the artist and the spectator - something akin to the experience of enlightenment in terms of religion. — Douglas Portway

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. — Alain De Botton

The ultimate aim of politics is not politics, but the activities which can be practised within the political framework of the State. Therefore an effective statement of these activities e.g. science , art , religion is in itself a declaration of ultimate aims around which the political means will crystallise ... a society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love . — Stephen Spender

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. — Friedrich Engels

Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There's no longer a need for the social construct of religion. — David G. McAfee

Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A semi-starved nation can have neither religion nor art nor organization. — Mahatma Gandhi

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving! — O. Henry

The Art of Peace is the religion that is not a religion; it perfects and completes all religions. — Morihei Ueshiba

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us. — Kary Mullis

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion, philosophy, art - those three pillars on which the world has rested - were invented by man in order symbolically to encapsulate the idea of infinity, setting against it a symbol of its possible attainment (which in real terms is of-course impossible). Humanity has found nothing else on such an enormous scale. Admittedly man found it by instinct, without understanding why he needed God (easier that way!) or philosophy (explains everything, even the meaning of life!) or art (immortality). — Andrei Tarkovsky

The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of "intellectuals" from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice
all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole. — John Dewey

I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human. — Rob Bell

Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are engaged in the arts should be the last to send any other message, because when artists endorse the traditional order of a society, it suggests that they have forgotten their own true role within it. — Robin Black

Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other's rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk? — Stephen Fry

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with! — Philip Roth

When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it. — Guillermo Del Toro

Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity. — Anais Nin

It took time for the church to come to terms with the ignominy of the cross. Church fathers forbade its depiction in art until the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine ... Now, though, the symbol is everywhere: artists beat gold into the shape of the Roman execution device, baseball players cross themselves before batting, and cancy confectioners even make chocolate crosses for the faithful to eat during Holy Week. Strange as it may seem, Christianity has become a religion of the cross
the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber, in modern terms. — Philip Yancey

What of Art?' she asked
'It is a malody.'
'Love?'
'Illusion'
'Religion?'
'A fashionable substitute for belief.'
'What are you?'
'To define is to limit — Oscar Wilde

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this 'living down', which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness. — Roger Scruton

Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago - just a couple of centuries - when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world's greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements. — Bruce Sheiman

What draws me to theater and religion are these rituals made to make you feel emotion. It's so banal in an interesting way. In visual art it's about making you feel emotional, but it's more subtle. — Ragnar Kjartansson

It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts. — Max Planck

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature. — Antonio Damasio

Art always helps religion; it became an inseparable phenomenon when human beings gained consciousness. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt. — Dodie Smith

I may grow rich by an art I am compelled to follow; I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment; but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and abhor. — Thomas Jefferson

Acting became important. It became an art that belonged to the actor, not to the director or producer, or the man whose money had bought the studio. It was an art that transformed you into somebody else, that increased your life and mind. I had always loved acting and tried hard to learn it. But with Michael Chekhov, acting became more than a profession to me. It became a sort of religion. — Marilyn Monroe

All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy. — Robertson Davies

I'm drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent - forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I'm sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us. — Krista Tippett

The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men.
'What a cold-blooded jest!' said he to himself. 'It was not devised by a God.'
From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art — Honore De Balzac

In religion, as in art and science, there are - in addition to times of great excitement - times of sober work and practice. Interaction with God must be practiced; otherwise we will not find the right tone, the right word, the right language, when he surprises us. We must learn God's language, laboriously learn it. And we must work at it, so that we will be able to talk with him. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light. — Franz Liszt

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion. — Ruth St. Denis

I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence
I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides. — Neil Peart

God is not interested in your art but, your heart. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted. — Lewis H. Lapham

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind. — Clive Bell

They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-"Where are you going?" which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, "Where are you going?"-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society "Looking for peace. — Jack Kerouac

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms. — John B. S. Haldane

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds. In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Art is beautiful but it is hard, like a religion without a purpose. — Gunter Brus

I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children. — Rosanne Cash

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

There learned arts do flourish in great honour
And poets's wits are had in peerless price;
Religion hath lay power, to rest upon her,
Advancing virtue, and suppressing vice.
For end all good, all grace there freely grows,
Had people grace it gratefully to use:
For God His gifts there plenteously bestows,
But graceless men them greatly do abuse. — Edmund Spenser

The stallion and his mare,
unbridled, with arrow-pattern,
are worked on.
the blue cloth
before the door
of religion and inspiration ... — Hilda Doolittle

Faith in a better than that which appears is no less required by art than by religion. — John Sterling

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals. — Theodore Zeldin

Everything progresses in waves. The march of civilization, the progression of worlds, is in waves. All human activities likewise progress in waves - art, literature, science, religion. — Swami Vivekananda