Top 100 Michael Leunig Quotes
#1. Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.
Michael Leunig
#2. On Anzac Day, coffee and jokes with a Turk might be the most meaningful and fair dinkum dawn service you could possibly have.
Michael Leunig
#3. For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life.
Michael Leunig
#4. Love one another and you will be happy, it is as simple and as difficult as that
Michael Leunig
#5. Happiness is just a little thing;
Humans mostly are too large for it.
If you cannot feel the joy of spring
Shrink yourself and maybe then you'll fit.
Michael Leunig
#6. I increasingly wonder whether most humans are in a constant state of unconsciously fearing each other. Perhaps they fear how intimately different other people might be to them, and the problem is that there is no real way of finding out just how huge that difference might be.
Michael Leunig
#7. Easter is not limited to the passion and death of Christ; it also includes the dismal tragedy of life unlived by the many, and all the loss of passion and truth that goes with it.
Michael Leunig
#8. Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.
Michael Leunig
#9. All good art is seditious, but the people in authority can never recognise it. I think when you mention sedition, artists are the ones whose eyes light up thinking, 'Oh, yes, I want some of that!'
Michael Leunig
#10. I never really understood who the Magi were as a child. What is a Magi? Not a word I would use, but a magpie I could understand.
Michael Leunig
#11. I have sometimes done cartoons that are hurtful to people - immature, spiteful stuff. Some are so self-indulgent, and some have just failed. I look back and sometimes cringe. But one regret as I get older is that I haven't been radical and wild enough.
Michael Leunig
#13. A society that's provided for by television is a society that says it doesn't need too many parks or natural situations for children to play in because television will look after them.
Michael Leunig
#16. Wars don't happen on battlefields; they go on happening in people's hearts for generations and generations, and the ecological damage is unfathomably complex and dire.
Michael Leunig
#17. A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.
Michael Leunig
#19. Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable!
Michael Leunig
#20. It is home schooling that is rejecting a narrowness. It is not a radical value system; it's actually quite conservative.
Michael Leunig
#21. Love a single an additional and you will be satisfied. It really is as easy and as challenging as that.
Michael Leunig
#23. If you know anything about ducks, you know a baby duck will imprint itself on you. It misses its mother.
Michael Leunig
#24. God help us to live slowly:
To move simply:
To look softly:
To allow emptiness:
To let the heart create for us.
Amen.
Michael Leunig
#25. Each day is a lifetime. In the morning we are born. The day lies before us: vast and bright and new.
Michael Leunig
#26. In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.
Michael Leunig
#27. Murk can be described as an enfeebled fog with a personality disorder; it is more troubled than ethereal, sulking moodily over our lives at the end of the day.
Michael Leunig
#28. The child who has no need to feign empirical knowledge about life can wonder and fantasise with great ease. The world is his oyster, or any other thing he wants it to be.
Michael Leunig
#29. The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.
Michael Leunig
#30. Anzac Day, it seems, must now be done with bluster, hoopla and media hypnotism.
Michael Leunig
#31. Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.
Michael Leunig
#33. Humans are nervous, touchy creatures and can be easily offended. Many are deeply insecure. They become focused and energized by taking offence; it makes them feel meaningful and alive.
Michael Leunig
#34. It is at Easter that Jesus is most human, and like all humans, he fails and is failed. His is not an all-powerful God, it is an all-vulnerable God.
Michael Leunig
#35. Democracy just isn't working any more; without sanity at its heart, it is becoming a most unique and fiendish tyranny.
Michael Leunig
#36. I am probably not alone in sensing above me the huge corporations and monstrous banks, science, politics and technologies, spy satellites and stock markets, military systems and massive wealth - forces and dynamics I don't understand or can hardly imagine.
Michael Leunig
#37. What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift.
Michael Leunig
#38. Making jokes is about the most wrong and stupid thing a bemused, middle-aged, white heterosexual Anglo Saxon sort of Celt Australian male can do these days.
Michael Leunig
#39. So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.
Michael Leunig
#40. I sense that the road to Heaven is paved with dashed hopes.
Michael Leunig
#41. I never had a spirit-breaking, soul-destroying religion drummed into me.
Michael Leunig
#42. To live in the midst of suffering, which we do, we do, amid distress, and to keep some equilibrium in the midst of that - that would be happiness enough.
Michael Leunig
#44. Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.
Michael Leunig
#45. The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.
Michael Leunig
#46. The expressive body is not literal; it's very primal, and that's what I feel when I make the best of my work. It's coming from a primal place rather than an intellectual place.
Michael Leunig
#47. In order to be truthful we must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth, receive truth, search for truth.
Michael Leunig
#48. I had many good teachers, but only three of them were school teachers.
Michael Leunig
#49. I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life.
Michael Leunig
#51. I don't like to brag, but I must tell you that I am regarded in some circles as being in the upper echelons of the elite loony left.
Michael Leunig
#52. A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out.
Michael Leunig
#53. Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better.
Michael Leunig
#55. I just happen to believe that what's at stake in the early child's development is so vital and so important, and I think it is founded in the main, in the broad cultural sense, on the relationship between the mother and child.
Michael Leunig
#56. A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times.
Michael Leunig
#57. Sweetheart,' 'darling,' 'luv.' I like these words; they fit me like a comfortable old pullover. I remember them from childhood; that's what innocent little boys were called by cheerful aunties back then, to make them feel welcome and secure in the world.
Michael Leunig
#58. What makes an interview 'difficult'? Well, there are many reasons, but the end result is usually the same: The guest just doesn't seem comfortable answering the question.
Michael Leunig
#60. In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.
Michael Leunig
#61. Meat workers may have been looked down upon socially, but at least they were well-paid and were a fit and lively bunch as a result of hard, honest physical work.
Michael Leunig
#62. The scariness of manhood to males may be symbolically seen in the many stories of indigenous Australian boys who ran away and hid in the bush as the time of initiation approached.
Michael Leunig
#63. The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we're still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.
Michael Leunig
#64. Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.
Michael Leunig
#65. People seem to take as much offence as they possibly can these days - it's almost a new type of greed, a new kind of road rage.
Michael Leunig
#66. All nations that throw their military weight around, occupying neighboring lands and treating the residents with callous and humiliating disregard, are already sliding towards the dark possibilities in human nature.
Michael Leunig
#67. Perhaps life is actually more confusing and unknowable to an adult than a child, but grown-ups have learned to deceive themselves and act as if they understand what's going on; and some are elected to high office on the basis of their ability to create this impression.
Michael Leunig
#68. I see a lot of my children. They're around the house all the time on the farm, you know.
Michael Leunig
#69. The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man - the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth.
Michael Leunig
#70. If you're becoming weary and disillusioned with Australian values, Judeo-Christian values or Western civilisation, I recommend strangers - they're such a glorious, redeeming wilderness to wander into.
Michael Leunig
#71. How many times have I heard people say, 'I became very ill a couple of years ago; it got very serious, and I look back and give thanks for how it changed me and the truth I found.'
Michael Leunig
#72. Where do I get my information from? Well, I get it from the radio, and I get it from the newspaper, and then I get it from my conversations, and I get it from the paddocks around the bush. I get it; it turns up. You'd be most surprised how it turns up.
Michael Leunig
#73. Of all the seasons, winter is the most conducive to the great art of dormancy. This art requires an appreciation of semi-consciousness: the beautiful and necessary prelude to sleep - a special pleasure in itself that is all too often neglected, under-valued or looked down upon.
Michael Leunig
#74. Falling down is a very big subject, and so is the concept of downfall. None of us escapes, and I have had my share of both.
Michael Leunig
#75. Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had.
Michael Leunig
#76. The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.
Michael Leunig
#77. There are moments when great music can be the greatest service and charity.
Michael Leunig
#78. The repression of virtuous instinct in the modern world is an incremental tragedy. Repress one instinct, and you repress many; other parts of consciousness go down, also.
Michael Leunig
#79. You wouldn't wish hardship on anyone, but when it comes, you would be crazy not to see the huge growth that will come from it.
Michael Leunig
#80. In some ways, calm bodily protest has a nakedness to it that may be deeply embarrassing for observers; an act not unlike the bare-faced Oliver Twist effrontery that stands vulnerably before authority, asking for more or better.
Michael Leunig
#81. My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union.
Michael Leunig
#82. It is difficult to imagine any time in history when so many people claiming to be so free have lived in so much fear of being unattractive.
Michael Leunig
#83. Stay away from excellence at all costs; it stinks.
Michael Leunig
#85. As we grow, we lift our gaze higher and higher, and then sometimes we are brought to our knees, but all is not lost; what we find on the ground can be very valuable and precisely what we need.
Michael Leunig
#87. Every child is a greedy child, I think. I mean, it's healthy to be a greedy child.
Michael Leunig
#88. Emotional stability has not been America's gift to the world.
Michael Leunig
#89. God bless this tiny little boat, And me who travels in it. It stays afloat for years and years, And sinks within a minute. And so the soul in which we sail, Unknown by years of thinking, Is deeply felt and understood, The minute that it's sinking.
Michael Leunig
#90. It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably - this is fundamental - but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways.
Michael Leunig
#91. We may lose our memory as we get older, but this might not be such a bad thing - who wants to drag a mental junkyard around at a time of life when you're starting to grow interesting little wings?
Michael Leunig
#92. Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped.
Michael Leunig
#94. It's terrible the way words get attached to you like barnacles.
Michael Leunig
#95. Socialised humanity represses nature and degrades human nature; it takes life and waters it down - probably to control it - diluting existence with water that is lukewarm, sweet and murky.
Michael Leunig
#96. Art is about the messy and marvelous business of coming to your senses - and also, to the senses of the world.
Michael Leunig
#97. Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old days are gone, and increasingly, leftists are to be found working in ordinary, proper jobs.
Michael Leunig
#98. I think melancholy is part of the natural condition, you know. Anyway, I think it's the artist's function to have their melancholy and not hide it, you see.
Michael Leunig
#99. Who can protest alone? Who dares rise up? It is not easy. One is all alone, and evermore shall be so.
Michael Leunig
#100. The world is philosophically booby-trapped; touch an interesting subject, and it just might blow up in your face. Some say it's better not to touch.
Michael Leunig
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