Michael Leunig Quotes

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

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would ima...

About Author

Michael Leunig (2 June 1945 – 19 December 2024), typically referred to by his pen name Leunig, was an Australian cartoonist, poet and artist. He was best known for his work for Melbourne's The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Leunig's works include The Curly Pyjama Letters, the cartoon books The Essential Leunig, The Wayward Leunig, The Stick, Goatperson, Short Notes from the Long History of Happiness and Curly Verse as well as The Lot, a compilation of his "Curly World" newspaper columns. Leunig also wrote several books of prayers, including A Common Prayer, The Prayer Tree and When I Talk To You.
Leunig was declared a Australian Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia in 1999.

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father.

In nicey-nicey land, you must be happy-clappy and positive all the time - bad news is taboo.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the mole...

Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.

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.

Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old day...

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...

Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the wor...

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

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

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.

Practically every technology that is ever invented is touted as being the new savior, the thing that will bring peace and goodwill to the earth, but immediately it falls into other hands who see it as...

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 cou...