Michael Leunig Quotations | Page 2

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there.

As we grow, we lift our gaze higher and higher, and then sometimes we are brought to our knees, but all is not lost; what we find on the ground can be very valuable and precisely what we need.

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.

A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times.

For 13 years, I struggled with education and have only just realised that I was actually struggling to protect myself from it. I was trying to protect my soul.

It's terrible the way words get attached to you like barnacles.

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.

The world is philosophically booby-trapped; touch an interesting subject, and it just might blow up in your face. Some say it's better not to touch.

Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

Socialised humanity represses nature and degrades human nature; it takes life and waters it down - probably to control it - diluting existence with water that is lukewarm, sweet and murky.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

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.

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.

I must warn you right here and now that I am a 'wet leftie,' a 'leftist' and also a member of the 'bleeding heart liberal left.' I had no say in it whatsoever. I woke up one morning, and these things were tattooed across my forehead.

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.

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.

I have not much love for the bright lights - unless it's the sun creeping up over the horizon.

I never had a spirit-breaking, soul-destroying religion drummed into me.

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.

I'm totally deaf in my right ear, yeah.

If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear - such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with.

I had a few ducks as a kid.

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.

If you know anything about ducks, you know a baby duck will imprint itself on you. It misses its mother.

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.

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.

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.

Citizens, regardless of their political inclinations, carry a devout sense of their shared culture and its temperament - and, having contributed to it all their lives, hold decent and reasonable hopes for its continued integrity.

Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage.

I don't think I have spiritual beliefs in the structured sense - but I believe in the absolute necessity of spirit and a healthy spiritual life. It grew inside me by itself, which is surely the very nature of spirit, and instinctively I protected and nourished it. I also absorbed spirituality by osmosis.

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.

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.'

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.

Happiness, it's a small thing - just a very little thing.

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.

There is some suffering that awaits us all.

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.

Don't give in to hate - it puts you off balance

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

I didn't mind my own company as a child; I was happy playing alone in the sandpit.

Ah, whimsical. It's terrible the way words get attached to you like barnacles. As is what I do is acting on a 'whim'. If only these were gifts from God when I get an idea, but everything I have done that I really love has had a lot of hard work behind it.

The cartoonist’s task is not so much to be balanced as to give balance, particularly in situations of disproportionate power relationships such as we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.

At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day.

Is a brazen and innocent confrontation with paternal authority an unbearably terrifying prospect to some? Are the consequences of a fathers anger and displeasure so catastrophic in the primal imagination that every semblance of it in the world both literally and metaphorically must be denounced in the strongest possible terms? It would seem so.

There was all this loneliness in my cartoons and people would say, "Gee, these characters are so lonely, disconnected, depressed." And I'd say, 'Yeah well, that's not me. I'm just interested in that because I think it makes a funny drawing.' But later I understood it was me in many respects; my hand was doing it ahead of the head's understanding.

In order to be truthful we must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth, receive truth, search for truth.

If European symbols and traditions have grown tired, perfunctory and oppressively banal in Australia, or been drained of spirit and meaning by the dreary dictates of materialism and secularity, then the raw spirit truth of our native land is alive and radiant by comparison. For joy and meaning we might well turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place.

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.

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.

There are only two feelings, Love and fear: There are only two languages, Love and fear: There are only two activities, Love and fear: There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results, Love and fear, Love and fear.

God help us to live slowly: To move simply: To look softly: To allow emptiness: To let the heart create for us. Amen.

In order to be truthful We must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth. We must also receive truth. We must also act upon truth. We must also search for truth. The difficult truth Within us and around us. We must devote ourselves to truth. Otherwise we are dishonest And our lives are mistaken. God grant us the strength and the courage To be truthful. Amen

Love a single an additional and you will be satisfied. It really is as easy and as challenging as that.

When the heart is cut or cracked or broken Do not clutch it Let the wound lie open Let the wind from the good old sea blow in to bathe the wound with salt and let it sting. Let a stray dog lick it Let a bird fly in the hole and sing a simple song like a tiny bell and let it ring.

God bless this tiny little boat, And me who travels in it. It stays afloat for years and years, And sinks within a minute. And so the soul in which we sail, Unknown by years of thinking, Is deeply felt and understood, The minute that it’s sinking.

Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It’s as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives...

Each day is a lifetime. In the morning we are born. The day lies before us: vast and bright and new.

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!'

A lot of mothers want to be with their children. They can't afford it for this reason or that reason.

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.

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.

The 'economy' became a god such as never before, and a happy, successful society was one that could please this god - sometimes by sacrificing beautiful things - to keep the deity from getting angry and harming the people by withdrawing favours.

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.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.