Best 17 quotes of Wendy Beckett on MyQuotes

A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor...Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom.

Again and again I've taken quick glances and then for some reason I've got to sit before a picture waiting and it's opened up like one of those Japanese flowers that you put into water and something I thought wasn't worth more than a casual, respectful glance begins to open up depth after depth of meaning.

All great art is a visual form of prayer.

A work of art is great to the extent that to encounter it is to be changed.

Great art changes you.

If continually people look and look and always come away enriched, then it's a great work

Looking at art is one way of listening to God.

Prejudice is always dangerous.

The dream world, the true freedom of the imagination, does not open to self-conscious manipulation.

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you.

There is no life without work, anxieties or tensions. Peace is not found in avoiding these but in understanding them and controlling their force.

Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs.

We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us.

You are not a saint because you keep the rules and are blameless; you are a saint if you live in the real world, going out and loving the real people God has put into your life.

Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.