Wendy Beckett quotes:

Looking at art is one way of listening to God.

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.

All great art is a visual form of prayer.

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

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

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

All in Dali is indeed contrived, a brilliant illustration of his own psyche as he understands it, as opposed to how it truly may have been.

Great art changes you.

Prejudice is always dangerous.

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.

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

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

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

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.