Top 75 Religious Art Quotes
#1. The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise
Isadora Duncan
#2. Music, among those who were styled the chosen people, was a religious art.
Joseph Addison
#3. Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.
Madeleine L'Engle
#4. It's been so long now and so much has happened that I am able now to look back with much less emotion and my take on Andy as an artist now comes down to a simple sentence: he made religious art for a secular society which is why it has so much appeal.
Bob Colacello
#5. It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.
John Walford
#6. we may think of religious art from a cultural standpoint, we should not look to pictures of God to show us his glory and move us to worship; for his glory is precisely what such pictures can never show us. And
J.I. Packer
#7. The headdresses of the Egyptians have great symbolic and emblematic importance, for they represent the auric bodies of the superhuman intelligences, and are used in the same way that the nimbus, halo, and aureole are used in Christian religious art.
Manly Hall
#8. I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.
Tim Crane
#9. The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for "religious" art or "Catholic" art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.
Jacques Maritain
#10. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#11. In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.
Antoni Tapies
#12. The Artist should not forget his mission, perhaps the most religious of all, of sustaining faith in the worthwhileness of art and thus of life.
Ernst Bacon
#13. However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath.
Martin Luther
#14. Liberal humanists now seem to dominate the fields of art, journalism, and communication, which are powerful and uniquely able to spread anti-Christian thought.
Tim LaHaye
#15. The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love.
Francois Pinault
#16. My God, my aim and my fulfillment; I am thy yesterday and thou are my tomorrow. I am they root in the earth and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.
Kahlil Gibran
#17. Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.
Gerhard Richter
#18. In the major institutions of education, government, science, and the arts, we are witnessing the imposition of a post-Christian view of life. It now dominates in motion pictures, television, and every other form of entertainment.
D. James Kennedy
#19. Do not discuss the religious matters with people; do not waste your valuable time to discuss the untruth! Your time is short; spend it for the science and the art!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#20. Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.
Chaim Potok
#22. Ignorance of the ages leaves me all but lifeless.
Not alone has it burnt sacred religious works,
but works of literature, art, philosophy, poetry,
astronomy, n' medicine, but to name a few.
Richard Mc Sweeney
#23. Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God ... The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.
Gerhard Richter
#24. Buechner is a worthy member of the great prose stylists: Pascal, Newman, and Merton, who have harnessed their art to a passionate religious faith.
Louis Auchincloss
#25. We ... believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.
Irving Stone
#26. In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.
Colm Toibin
#27. Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#28. It was then that my religious consciousness emerged to flower years afterward into definite forms of religious dancing in which there is no sense of division between spirit and flesh, religion and art.
Ruth St. Denis
#29. 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
#30. [On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art.
Riane Eisler
#31. I think it's not particularly necessary to lead a religious life. People progress just as well in music, or art, or math or science or gardening or whatever. It all seems to work as well and the process is good.
Jim Henson
#32. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.
James G. Frazer
#33. The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.
Tom Wolfe
#34. In the case of someone who is spiritual receptive, it is possible to talk of an analogy between the impact made by a work of art and that of a purely religious experience. Arts acts above all on the soul shaping its spiritual structure.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#35. The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.
Leland Ryken
#36. You're serving. You're not a servant. Serving is a supreme art. God is the first servant. God serves men but he's not a servant to men. - Eliseo Orefice
Roberto Benigni La Vita E Bella
#37. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself.
Thomas Merton
#38. How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
Albert Einstein
#39. People whom live in a world dominated by science and technology are losing belief in God and turning away from religion. Science eliminated the traditions that formerly made living an art form including the rain celebration of spring and traditional harvest festivals.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#40. 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
#41. Religion will not get us where we need to go. It just goes so far, and then we're on our own toward the open space where there are no religious practices or beliefs.
Art Hochberg
#42. There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Michael Leunig
#43. Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values.
Jamake Highwater
#44. I was born into a very religious family with no TVs and a very strict Episcopal Christian religion. Music was my outlet and more of my therapy than anything, but yeah, it was the one thing in life that I've had, art and music.
DJ Ashba
#45. All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Salman Rushdie
#46. And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
Walter Pater
#47. I think that spirituality is important for all people to develop. I don't mean there necessarily has to be a religious aspect to spirituality. Some people are spiritual in a religious way, other people are spiritual in their work and in their art and in their treatment of other people.
Assata Shakur
#48. True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it.
Michelangelo
#49. I really do think that art can save you in some sense. It's the last meaning, unless you're religious-and I'm not religious. It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It's an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay.
Sam Savage
#50. Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us.
Umberto Boccioni
#51. Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.
Joan Miro
#52. Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
#53. Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?
Marcel Duchamp
#54. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.
Spider Webb
#55. Science, art, learning and metaphysical research all have their proper functions in life, but if you seek to blend them, you destroy their individual characteristics until, in time, you eliminate the spiritual, for instance, from the religious altogether.
Swami Vivekananda
#56. At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.
Catherine Hicks
#57. As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.
Ruth Benedict
#58. 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
#59. I think ... that philosophy has the duty of pointing out the falsity of outworn religious ideas, however estimable they may be as a form of art. We cannot act as if all religion were poetry while the greater part of it still functions in its ancient guise of illicit science and backward morals ...
Corliss Lamont
#60. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs
George Orwell
#61. I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me
and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.
D.H. Lawrence
#62. Now the images and temples constructed by mechanics are made of inert matter, so that they too are inert, material, and profane. Even if you perfect the art, it partakes of mechanical coarseness. Works of art cannot then be sacred and divine.
Clement Of Alexandria
#63. Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.
Henry Fuseli
#64. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.
Madeleine L'Engle
#65. But it is with a different kind of spell that art deludes you ... it leads you to pay religious honor and worship to images and pictures.
Clement Of Alexandria
#66. The art of humility begins with a recognition of our dependence on others and an appreciation of God's gift of life.
Wilferd Peterson
#67. The divine element manifests itself (or show up) in man as well by his aptitude for science, than by his aptitude for virtue. True morality, true philosophy and true art are in their essence ("dans leur essence", Fr.) religious.
African Spir
#68. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.
C.S. Lewis
#69. Many works would be senseless, real junk, but for the fact that, being art, they are exhibited because they have a message of almost religious importance, interpreting man and his world - yes, perhaps even as junk.
H.R. Rookmaaker
#70. The most important function of art and science is to
Awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.
Albert Einstein
#71. I do believe that one way to bring cultures together, to develop trust between people and countries and religions, is through education. And through music and art and basketball and activities and joys that people share worldwide, regardless of ethnic background or religious orientation.
Steve Kerr
#72. There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.
John Boorman
#73. The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln
#74. I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.
Irving Stone
#75. The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.
Greg Forster
