Edvard Munch
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.Collection: Death
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.Collection: Women
I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.Collection: Peace
For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.Collection: Art
Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.Collection: Death
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.Collection: Fear
Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.Collection: Death
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.Collection: Nature
Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.Collection: Death
The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.
Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.
Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.
In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.
It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.
Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.
I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.
One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.
To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.
Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.Collection: Art
I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.Collection: Art
What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.Collection: Art
All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood.Collection: Art
I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.Collection: Fire
There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.Collection: Men
I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.Collection: Vision
My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferingsCollection: Art
A work of art comes only from inside a human being.Collection: Art
Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.Collection: Soul
At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.Collection: Art
My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ... my art gives meaning to my life.Collection: Art
The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.Collection: Church
Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.Collection: Art
A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.Collection: Art
From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation.Collection: Summer
I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.Collection: Art
I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heartCollection: Art
My will exceeds my talents.Collection: Talent
Without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.Collection: Should Have