The Painter's Keys Community For Artists The Painter's Keys, a book by Robert Genn

Search the Painter's Keys:

Search for an author:

To Subscribe: enter your email address and click "Go"

Absolutely free, no strings. Cancel at any time. You'll get the valuable twice-weekly letter only.

Your email address will not be lent, sold or put on any spam or other nasty list. Guaranteed.

Robert's worldwide gift that artists love to get.
Bob’s Best

Mastering colour, learning to paint, finding out how successful artists run their lives, or setting up an artist’s website--these are Robert Genn’s top picks of the best currently available DVDs and Downloads. They have been studied and evaluated by Robert and have received his unsolicited “Seal of Approval.” Check out the selection here.

Resource of Art Quotations

For researchers or artists just looking for inspiration, this is the world's largest collection of art quotes and sayings--online or in a book. It's entirely the work of volunteer subscribers and others. New art quotes are going in daily. Our staff will make all your entries searchable by author and subject. One word of caution--don't try to print it all out--you will run out of ink if you do.

Subscribe to the Free Twice-Weekly Letter: See our Welcome Letter about subscription benefits and an outline of the features of this website.

Receive daily art quotes through Twitter

Follow us on Twitter to receive daily inspirational art quotes as well as lots of other great info for artists.


«Spectator Art Quotes

·previous quote category·

Search for another category:

Spontaneity Art Quotes»

·next quote category·

Spirituality Art Quotes

78 art quotes about Spirituality | Submit more Spirituality art quotes

The main thing is that we are part of the reality in ourselves to perfect one's power of discovery and that leads to the discovery of our organic ourselves without fear of immersing ourselves in the earth, the sea, fire or air. (Pierre Alechinsky)

The search for the spirit... insists on the collaboration of the different basins of knowledge found in the diverse cultures our world has manufactured. (Carlos Rodriguez Amadeo)

I love everybody. Each one plays the role they have to play, but in the spiritual arena there are people who are even closer to me than that. (Meher Baba)

Spiritual love is a position of standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy. (Christina Baldwin)

Art becomes a spiritual process depending upon the degree of commitment that you bring to it. Every experience becomes direct food for your art. Then your art teaches you about life. (Nick Bantock)

No other concept challenges the mind as powerfully as spiritual oneness, because oneness is total and has no opposite. (Philippe Benichou)

Each moment of the creative process engages the senses more fully, with richer and more focused awareness. In art practice we can become transcendence, one with all beings and our world. (Dianne Bersea)

A spiritual search in art is looking for meaning outside of yourself. (Ross Bleckner)

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry. (Robert Bly)

Art is something about the spirit... if you want to make something that has a spirit, and speaks to the spirit of other people in the world, you have to touch it, you have to physically address it... if you don't, if you just farm it out, it becomes a product. (Shary Boyle)

There is no object that we see; no action that we do; no good that we enjoy; no evil that we feel, or fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all: and he that makes such improvement is wise, as well as pious. (Anne Bradstreet)

I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. (Emily Bronte)

First, one seeks to become an artist by training the hand. Then one finds it is the eye that needs improving. Later one learns it is the mind that wants developing, only to find that the ultimate quest of the artist is in the spirit. (Larry Brullo)

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life. (Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha)

Creativity is the voice of the spirit. One's art should be the extension of oneself. (Maritza Burgos)

The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises. (Leo Buscaglia)

The spiritual is the parent of the practical. (Thomas Carlyle)

The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures... (Emily Carr)

To transmit the spirit, there must be form. When the form, the mind and the hand are in total accord, each forgetting the other's separate existence, then the spirit will reside in your work. (Tung Ch'i-Ch'ang)

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe. (Marc Chagall)

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

Coincidences are spiritual puns. (G. K. Chesterton)

Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic - this is the spiritual path. (Pema Chodron)

We're not human beings that have occasional spiritual experiences... we're spiritual beings that have occasional human experiences. (Deepak Chopra)

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis. (Doug Coupland)

At its most basic, the spiritual is the experience of the connectedness that underlies reality. The depth of that experience depends on the capacity of the individual to set aside considerations of self, thereby gaining access to connection. (Arthur Deikman)

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. (Dr. Wayne Dyer)

I'm trying to touch people, trying to reach out to a common spirituality. (Max Ferguson)

The artist's quest is to succeed in combining and balancing all compositional attributes and physical elements into those that are purely spiritual. That is the secret of art. (Edward J. Fraughton)

Spirituality for me is the sum total of all the acts of my day. (Ari Goldman)

Spirit can walk, spirit can swim, spirit can climb, spirit can crawl. There is no terrain you cannot overcome. (Irisa Hail)

Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional. (Dean Hamer)

Never forget that it is the spirit with which you endow your work that makes it useful or futile. (Adelaide Hasse)

Practical tips and spiritual practice can seem to be on opposite sides, but I think one really needs both. Without the spiritual dimension what is the point? (Margot Hattingh)

In a tree there is a spirit of life, a spirit of growth and a spirit of holding its head up. (Robert Henri)

Don't stop to paint the material, but push on to give the spirit. (Robert Henri)

Being 'spiritual' simply means being willing to look into the nature of life, to ask questions and to wonder, and to listen. It also means seeing art everywhere. (Quang Ho)

After all, it is the divinity within that makes the divinity without... (Washington Irving)

From the highest, or yogic, point of view, the Seer and Seen are one and the same being, existing as our pure awareness. If that is true, then nothing is hidden from us. (Alar Jurma)

Perhaps the most 'spiritual' thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness. (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support. (Franz Kafka)

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution. (Franz Kafka)

Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his heart is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach to heaven. (Wassily Kandinsky)

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space? (Anish Kapoor)

My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright... They are all very kind to me. (Paul Klee)

Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above all the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space. (Yves Klein)

Much of what is billed as 'art' today is a reflection of the deep spiritual poverty that has overtaken the lives of many artists. Out of the darkness comes more darkness. Emptiness yields up emptiness. (Brian Knowles)

Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future... Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. (Willem de Kooning)

Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform calamity and misfortune into the path. (Dalai Lama)

For thousands of years, much of humankind has believed that only special places are infused with the sacred and that you must get away from the everyday in order to find it. Not so, everything is infused with the holy - from chairs to clothing to kitchen stoves. (Anthony Lawlor)

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. (Thomas Merton)

-Epicurean Simplicity
My spirituality is parochial, terrestrial. I do qualify as a W.I.T.C.H. (Woman Interested in Talking to Crows and Herbs), but my irrecular practice and impromptu rituals don't aim at producing any dramatic results except, perhaps, in me. (Stephanie Mills)

Mind can come. All this world is minds. But something is not concerned with the calculating, interpreting tendency of the mind. (Mooji)

Almost everything we call art is the spiritualization of cruelty. (Susan Musgrave)

There's no greatest moment in the arts. It's a life; it's a continuity thing. You can't have a great moment because it's spiritual. It's a belief; it's a calling. If you're an artist, doing your own thing on your own, it's while you're doing it that counts. It's a process. If you get too elated, you can get too depressed. (LeRoy Neiman)

Light and sound are elements of Spirit. (Elle Nicolai)

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Spiritual awakening is a private jouney. It happens in degrees. (Nisla)

There is a god within us. (Ovid)

Sexual activity, and the thoughts and fantasies of sex, use up a great portion of our vital force. When that force is conserved through abstinence, it becomes sublimated as spiritual energy. (Patanjali)

The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one. (M. Scott Peck)

As I lived up to the highest light I had, higher and higher light came to me. (Peace Pilgrim)

We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. (Plotinus)

I am a spiritual person living in a human body, not a human body with a spirit. (Bob Proctor)

When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left. (Sufi proverb)

Be it known that the spiritual world in outward appearance is entirely similar to the natural world. (Howard Pyle)

The night sky becomes a metaphor for openness and unexplored possibilities... an open door to the possibilities of the spiritual life. (Greg Pyra)

Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It's as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind. (Bridget Riley)

...so we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of our day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time. (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

The Eternal looked upon me for a moment with His eye of power, and annihilated me in His being, and become manifest to me in His essence. I saw I existed through Him. (Rumi)

You can't evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time. (George William Russell)

I'm more convinced each day of the complete unreality of the material world and the supreme vitality of the invisible world of spirit. (Paul Russo)

Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle. (Freya Stark)

Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being... Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual. (David Steindl-Rast)

It's not about what it is made of nor how it is made, it's about inspiration of function that renders the soul which makes craft 'art.' Craft is based on functionality and spirituality is the basis of art. (Jacques Vesery)

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking. (Voltaire)

The measure of the artist is to have the eye to see the spirit underlying the particulars, and the skill to capture both in paint. (Marney Ward)

You cannot, and will not, encounter a circumstance, or a single moment, that does not serve directly and immediately the need of your soul to heal. (Gary Zukav)


«Spectator Art Quotes

·previous quote category·

Search for another category:

Spontaneity Art Quotes»

·next quote category·



back to Category Index

Editor: Robert Genn

Assistant Editor: Shawn Jackson

Associate Editors:

Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Sara Genn, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,
And many others who have so far contributed one quote or a few. Please join us and add more at

World's largest resource of art quotes, art sayings, creativity quotes,
painting quotes, famous art quotes, inspirational art quotes.

Robert's worldwide gift that artists love to get.

Absolutely free, no strings. Cancel at any time.
You'll get the valuable twice-weekly letter only.
Your email address will not be lent, sold or put
on any spam or other nasty list. Guaranteed.
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE FREE

Last modified: May 25, 2013