Corita Kent

“Consider everything an experiment.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Damn everything but the circus.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Don't belittle yourself. Be BIG yourself.”

“Flowers grow out of dark moments.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”