Quotes from Lawren Harris

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life.

The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation: it changes us.

Sometimes, indeed often, we work on a theme with an unformed idea, and, when it has passed through the process, its final result is something we could never have predicted when we commenced.

Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure.

We were told, quite seriously, that there never would be a Canadian art because we had no art tradition.

(Ars longa vita brevis.) Art is long life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.

For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can.