Top 100 Leunig Quotes
#1. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father.
Michael Leunig
#8. An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.
Michael Leunig
#9. 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
#10. I had many good teachers, but only three of them were school teachers.
Michael Leunig
#11. My children just want to get at the world; it is so pleasantly surprising to witness that.
Michael Leunig
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.
Michael Leunig
#15. 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
#17. 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
#18. I never had a spirit-breaking, soul-destroying religion drummed into me.
Michael Leunig
#19. I sense that the road to Heaven is paved with dashed hopes.
Michael Leunig
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Democracy just isn't working any more; without sanity at its heart, it is becoming a most unique and fiendish tyranny.
Michael Leunig
#25. 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
#26. Practically every technology that is ever invented is touted as being the new savior, the thing that will bring peace and goodwill to the earth, but immediately it falls into other hands who see it as the opportunity to promote the very opposite.
Michael Leunig
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Two's company and three's a crowd, but seven can be an uprising. And the seven can become 70 or 700 or 7000 very quickly if the sense of being wronged is felt broadly and truly enough.
Michael Leunig
#30. 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
#31. I see a lot of my children. They're around the house all the time on the farm, you know.
Michael Leunig
#32. Happiness, it's a small thing - just a very little thing.
Michael Leunig
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.
Michael Leunig
#37. All the world loves a young emerging artist, and sometimes it seems that all the world wants to be one - on a bad, gloomy planet, to be colourful and creative seems so promising.
Michael Leunig
#38. 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
#39. As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing.
Michael Leunig
#40. 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
#41. In later life, we don't easily talk of fears, but instead we discuss our 'concerns.' Fear seems too primal and hysterical, but concern is polite and intellectual and nicely under control.
Michael Leunig
#42. 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
#43. In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.
Michael Leunig
#45. Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'
Michael Leunig
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times.
Michael Leunig
#49. 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
#50. Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West.
Michael Leunig
#51. 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
#53. The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.
Michael Leunig
#54. When people talk about their God, it is difficult to know what they actually mean, and when people talk about their atheism, it is usually incomprehensible also.
Michael Leunig
#55. 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
#56. There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed.
Michael Leunig
#57. 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
#60. I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction.
Michael Leunig
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable!
Michael Leunig
#65. 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
#66. Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.
Michael Leunig
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Love one another and you will be happy, it is as simple and as difficult as that
Michael Leunig
#71. 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
#72. As a child, I dreamed that my bed could fly and glide and swoop and hover high over the countryside near my home while, snug and secure, I looked down in wonder at the great carpet of life that seemed so perfect beneath me.
Michael Leunig
#73. 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
#74. Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.
Michael Leunig
#75. Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage.
Michael Leunig
#76. It's a consoling notion that death is a very tiny hole, and you need to make yourself very small to get through it. One obviously needs to lighten off, and a rucksack full of bricks or a mantelpiece full of trophies will certainly have to be abandoned - the sooner the better, I say.
Michael Leunig
#77. At my advanced age, I know I am not an anti-Semite, not even vaguely or remotely, but others would seem to know better, as false accusers always do.
Michael Leunig
#78. 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
#80. Many people first encounter Jesus during childhood when they are suddenly confronted by a horrifying statue of a man nailed to a cross, and this is often a most unfortunate and repulsive beginning.
Michael Leunig
#81. What really irks me is the snide victimizing suggestion from some that I have tried to be lighthearted and funny ... Oh my God - this is so offensive.
Michael Leunig
#82. I didn't mind my own company as a child; I was happy playing alone in the sandpit.
Michael Leunig
#83. In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.
Michael Leunig
#84. Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality - which indeed may be a rare achievement.
Michael Leunig
#85. Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.
Michael Leunig
#86. Anzac Day, it seems, must now be done with bluster, hoopla and media hypnotism.
Michael Leunig
#87. The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.
Michael Leunig
#88. Pre-Christmas is very important, and it is stressful, and, you know, even in the biblical story ... travelling on the donkey in a stressful environment.
Michael Leunig
#89. In the modern world, it may be that a living father can only be half a father to a boy - the dead father is the other vital half: the half that grows the boy up once and for all.
Michael Leunig
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Each day is a lifetime. In the morning we are born. The day lies before us: vast and bright and new.
Michael Leunig
#95. 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
#96. If you know anything about ducks, you know a baby duck will imprint itself on you. It misses its mother.
Michael Leunig
#97. A lot of mothers want to be with their children. They can't afford it for this reason or that reason.
Michael Leunig
#99. Love a single an additional and you will be satisfied. It really is as easy and as challenging as that.
Michael Leunig
#100. It is home schooling that is rejecting a narrowness. It is not a radical value system; it's actually quite conservative.
Michael Leunig
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
