Evelyn Underhill Art Quotations

In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.

All artist are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.

Love makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.

The heart outstrips the clumsy senses, and sees - perhaps for an instant, perhaps for long periods of bliss - an undistorted and more veritable world.

The determined fixing of our will upon God, and pressing toward him steadily and without deflection; this is the very center and the art of prayer.

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.