Corita Kent Quotations

Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed.

Love the moment and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.

Words have life and must be cared for. If they are stolen for ugly uses or careless slang or false promotion work, they need to be brought back to their original meaning - back to their roots.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

When art has changed, it's because the world was changing.

Groceries became a revelation: the people coming out with bundles of food. It's all like a great ceremony, and the whole drudgery of shopping has become my inspiration.

Someone remarked that the newspapers or the news magazines are the same as the psalms except that the names changed in the stories. Maybe you can't understand the psalms without understanding the newspaper and the other way around.

When someone drew a picture of Pope John wearing an Avis 'We try harder' button, those words no longer meant which car rental to patronize, and yet some of the overtones from its original meaning are there and make a contribution to the new situation.

You can enjoy the quality of the ad and not let them pressure you to buy what you don't really need. I have had fun taking back superlatives and just ordinary good words and phrases from ads and trying to restore some of their life to them.

Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries

When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at things until their import, identity, name, use, and description have dissolved.

Earnestness and sincerity are synonymous.

Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some gods would dream of.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

A responsible person is one who responds.

In this speedy world of ours when facts are multiplying rapidly and giant rearrangements are happening all around us, it seems dangerous to be made nervous by the new - to want what we can never have, to want things not to be rearranged. It would be better to be able to take the leap, which is to be able not only to live with change and newness, but even to help make it.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

Life stands still when mankind is afraid to take a chance.

Damn everything but the circus

Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is 'to fit together' and we all do this every day.

Flowers grow out of dark moments.

Regard everything as an experiment.

Don't belittle yourself. Be BIG yourself.

Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.

To understand is to stand under which is to look up to which is a good way to understand.

Creative ability is often mistakenly attributed to inborn talent. It is about all the ability to connect one thing with another.

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

One of the things Jesus did was to step aside from the organized religion of his time because it had become corrupt and bogged down with rules. Rules became more important than feeding the hungry.

To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.

It is a huge danger to pretend that awful things do not happen. But you need enough hope to keep going. I am trying to make hope. Flowers grow out of darkness.

When you are not separate from the creative process, time ceases to exist. You might start to feel tired and suddenly realize that much time has passed. It isn't necessarily a happy time - and may be very difficult to start if it is a job or an obligation. But if' you start with all the concrete needs and proceed in a thorough way - the creative process will take over and you will forget whether it is work or play. Working in the here and now is one of the most uncontaminated ways to work.

Celebration is a kind of food we all need in our lives, and each individual brings a special recipe or offering, so that together we will make a great feast. Celebration is a human need that we must not, and can not, deny. It is richer and fuller when many work and then celebrate together.

Consider everything an experiment.

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.

Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.