Book detail: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book delves into the profound relationship between spirituality and the creative process, offering insights into how faith can inspire and influence artistic endeavors.
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“But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grown-ups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children, because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“I hope that I will never forget the salvific power of joyful laughter.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will proudce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect, and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in the world.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five and . . . and . . . and . . .”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“To be a witness means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“In reading we must become creators.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“I love, therefore I am vulnerable.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Art is communication.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“For that moment, at least, all our doors and windows were wide open; we were not carefully shutting out God's purifying light, in order to feel safe and secure; we were bathed in the same light that burned and yet did not consume the bush. We walked barefoot on holy ground.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“The prayer of words cannot be eliminated. And I must pray them daily, whether I feel like praying or not. Otherwise, when God as something to say to me, I will not know how to listen. Until I have worked through self, I will not be enabled to get out of the way.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Following Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do with love.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“As I listen to the silence, I learn that my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable. To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Wherever she was, holy laughter was present to heal and redeem.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“A life lived in chaos is an impossibility.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Art should communicate with as many people as possible.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“When we look at a painting, or hear a symphony, or read a book, and feel more Named, then, for us, that work is a work of Christian art. But to look at a work of art and then to make a judgment as to whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is Christian, is presumptuous. It is something we cannot know in any conclusive way. We can know only if it speaks within our own hearts, and leads us to living more deeply with Christ in God.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Remember the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below; but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.”
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art