Lawren Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Desire creates a starting point. Without it, no magic can be put into action.

Lawren Leo

#4. She prayed to the gods of love and the gods of destruction, for they are one and the same.

Lawren Leo

#5. The secret to excitement is discovering new paths, and having the courage to take them.

Lawren Leo

#6. 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

#7. Mother Earth allows us to live and to walk on her surface, not the other way around.

Lawren Leo

#8. The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

Lawren Harris

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Lawren Leo

#12. The wind went mute and the trees in the forest stood still. It was time for the last tale.

Lawren Leo

#13. Every spell is a journey.

Lawren Leo

#14. 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

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

Lawren Leo

#16. In the inner place where true artists create there exists a pure child.

Lawren Harris

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead.

Lawren Leo

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

Lawren Harris

#23. The thought of today cannot be expressed in the language of yesterday.

Lawren Harris

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Creativity is at the root of excitement.

Lawren Leo

#31. New material demands new methods, and new methods fling a challenge to old convention.

Lawren Harris

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Lawren Leo

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

Lawren Leo

#37. For a thought to manifest on the earth realm, a sacrifice must occur.

Lawren Leo

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. They kissed in the middle of the sidewalk, letting the crowds of people flow around them like water around an island.

Lawren Leo

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

Lawren Leo

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure.

Lawren Harris

#45. Strength, Confidence
Original Thought
I Seek You Out
Until Your Caught

Lawren Leo

#46. 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

#47. A confident decision makes a lasting goal.

Lawren Leo

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

Lawren Leo

#49. 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

#50. We have the power to change voluntarily, and there is something wonderful and awe-inspiring about that power.

Lawren Leo

#51. 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

#52. Purpose creates a belief in a higher power, directing you toward your goal on the best path possible.

Lawren Leo

#53. For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can.

Lawren Harris

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Lawren Leo

#58. 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

#59. Are we taking the drunken drivers off the road only to turn them into drunken pedestrians?

Lawren Harris

#60. Sacred signs always come when your soul calls out in pain or joy.

Lawren Leo

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

Lawren Harris

#64. Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life.

Lawren Harris

#65. 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

#66. She looked at his face and saw a monk and a detective, both beautiful and bizarre.

Lawren Leo

#67. Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation: it changes us.

Lawren Harris