Top 172 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Leunig - Page 3

Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality - which indeed may be a rare achievement.

There are moments when great music can be the greatest service and charity.

While the world may feel entitled and have the power to pronounce an individual crazy, are there times when the innocent genius, the insightful individual or just the old grandmother may reasonably declare the world to be mad? Probably, but what hope or happiness would such an individual have?

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality.

Democracy just isn't working any more; without sanity at its heart, it is becoming a most unique and fiendish tyranny.

Anzac Day, it seems, must now be done with bluster, hoopla and media hypnotism.

On Anzac Day, coffee and jokes with a Turk might be the most meaningful and fair dinkum dawn service you could possibly have.

I sense that the road to Heaven is paved with dashed hopes.

I must warn you right here and now that I am a 'wet leftie,' a 'leftist' and also a member of the 'bleeding heart liberal left.' I had no say in it whatsoever. I woke up one morning, and these things were tattooed across my forehead.

As a child, I dreamed that my bed could fly and glide and swoop and hover high over the countryside near my home while, snug and secure, I looked down in wonder at the great carpet of life that seemed so perfect beneath me.

When people talk about their God, it is difficult to know what they actually mean, and when people talk about their atheism, it is usually incomprehensible also.

Life itself is offensive and certainly does not apologize - in fact, it hurts considerably and, as we all know, is often very rude and troublesome, just as nature or art can be.

Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better.

Citizens, regardless of their political inclinations, carry a devout sense of their shared culture and its temperament - and, having contributed to it all their lives, hold decent and reasonable hopes for its continued integrity.

What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times.

I increasingly wonder whether most humans are in a constant state of unconsciously fearing each other. Perhaps they fear how intimately different other people might be to them, and the problem is that there is no real way of finding out just how huge that difference might be.

At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.

As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing.

To be a pleasant person, you would at least need to see the point of being a pleasant person, or have it explained to you at some sort of 'finishing school' where you could actually learn the laws of propriety and the skills of appearing well-adapted, easygoing and attractively trouble free. But where do you learn these things? I don't know.

I don't like to brag, but I must tell you that I am regarded in some circles as being in the upper echelons of the elite loony left.

Socialised humanity represses nature and degrades human nature; it takes life and waters it down - probably to control it - diluting existence with water that is lukewarm, sweet and murky.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped.

There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life - and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life's ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all.

Today, people call each other 'guys' - this derives from Guy Fawkes, the bomb-making terrorist. No greater tribute has ever been paid to anyone in the history of politics.

If you're becoming weary and disillusioned with Australian values, Judeo-Christian values or Western civilisation, I recommend strangers - they're such a glorious, redeeming wilderness to wander into.

Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet having no words or no need to say it but instead to just assimilate the feeling.

It's a consoling notion that death is a very tiny hole, and you need to make yourself very small to get through it. One obviously needs to lighten off, and a rucksack full of bricks or a mantelpiece full of trophies will certainly have to be abandoned - the sooner the better, I say.

At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day.

If European symbols and traditions have grown tired, perfunctory and oppressively banal in Australia, or been drained of spirit and meaning by the dreary dictates of materialism and secularity, then the raw spirit truth of our native land is alive and radiant by comparison. For joy and meaning we might well turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place.

I didn't mind my own company as a child; I was happy playing alone in the sandpit.

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non-compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.

In order to be truthful We must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth. We must also receive truth. We must also act upon truth. We must also search for truth. The difficult truth Within us and around us. We must devote ourselves to truth. Otherwise we are dishonest And our lives are mistaken. God grant us the strength and the courage To be truthful. Amen

Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It's as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives.

God bless this tiny little boat, And me who travels in it. It stays afloat for years and years, And sinks within a minute. And so the soul in which we sail, Unknown by years of thinking, Is deeply felt and understood, The minute that it’s sinking.

In order to be truthful we must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth, receive truth, search for truth.

When the heart is cut or cracked or broken Do not clutch it Let the wound lie open Let the wind from the good old sea blow in to bathe the wound with salt and let it sting. Let a stray dog lick it Let a bird fly in the hole and sing a simple song like a tiny bell and let it ring.

Love a single an additional and you will be satisfied. It really is as easy and as challenging as that.

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that

Don't give in to hate - it puts you off balance

There are only two feelings, Love and fear: There are only two languages, Love and fear: There are only two activities, Love and fear: There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results, Love and fear, Love and fear.

Ah, whimsical. It's terrible the way words get attached to you like barnacles. As is what I do is acting on a 'whim'. If only these were gifts from God when I get an idea, but everything I have done that I really love has had a lot of hard work behind it.

There was all this loneliness in my cartoons and people would say, "Gee, these characters are so lonely, disconnected, depressed." And I'd say, 'Yeah well, that's not me. I'm just interested in that because I think it makes a funny drawing.' But later I understood it was me in many respects; my hand was doing it ahead of the head's understanding.

Each day is a lifetime. In the morning we are born. The day lies before us: vast and bright and new.

God help us to live slowly: To move simply: To look softly: To allow emptiness: To let the heart create for us. Amen.

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.

For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life.

What makes an interview 'difficult'? Well, there are many reasons, but the end result is usually the same: The guest just doesn't seem comfortable answering the question.

Is a brazen and innocent confrontation with paternal authority an unbearably terrifying prospect to some? Are the consequences of a fathers anger and displeasure so catastrophic in the primal imagination that every semblance of it in the world both literally and metaphorically must be denounced in the strongest possible terms? It would seem so.

The cartoonist’s task is not so much to be balanced as to give balance, particularly in situations of disproportionate power relationships such as we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.