52 Quotes by Michael Gungor

Art has been around for a really long time. Music has been around for a really long time. Painting and sculpture and plays have been around for a really long time. But it's only in the last fifty years that there's been an industry . . . that's new . . . It used to be, you didn't become an artist to become rich, you became an artist because you had an idea to share, cause you had an emotion to share.

The value of the art must be indicated by something more than how many people like it or how much money it earns. This can be particularly difficult for Americans, who so often find their identity in what they are paid to do.

Selling your soul for money, recognition, or any otherworldly good is like selling your hearing for a music collection. It's pointless. What good is the music if you can't hear it? No amount of money or power is worth even a shred of the human soul.

Our cultural conditioning is so ingrained in us that we often see these customs and taboos as inherent to the fabric of the cosmos. We spiritualize them. Legalize them. And when someone else doesn't follow them, it can feel to us like an attack on our very personhood. This kind of cultural blindness affects how we order creation.

She didn't even insult me. She just didn't compliment me. This is how fragile the ego can be in connection with our creative expressions. The critic's voice is so powerful because it resonates with the voices of our deepest fears, those voices speaking from the inside of us, telling us that we are not good enough. The critics confirm our repressed and terrified suspicions that we don't measure up, that we are unsafe and unlovable.

It is the nature of market economies to render everything a commodity.

Capitalism tends to do to art what value meals do to cuisine. Think of what the food industry in our nation has done to our food. When dollars and cents are the sole purpose for the manufacturing and distribution of food, the food suffers. We suffer. The mass production, hormones and pesticides that have allowed the food industry to make more money have made our food less nutritious than it ever has been. Animals are treated cruelly. People get fat and sick and die.

Fundamentalism is a lot like idolatry because it renders truth into something stagnant and lifeless. For the Christian fundamentalist, God becomes something that can be understood in the mind- a conceptual idol.

All human creativity depends on something deeper than itself.