Max Ernst
All good ideas arrive by chance.Collection: Chance
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.Collection: Reality
Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.Collection: Artist
Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.Collection: Creativity
Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tastedCollection: Art
Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.Collection: Reality
Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness.Collection: Art
Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back.Collection: Water
The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.Collection: Roles
Woman's nudity is wiser than the philosopher's teachings.Collection: Beauty
The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.Collection: Artist
When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.Collection: Artist
I have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the painting itself that should be beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.Collection: Records
I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works.Collection: Birth
And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us.Collection: Bird
Art has got nothing to do with taste.Collection: Art
The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility.Collection: Christian
A series of powers are at work within the great stream of Expressionism who have no outward similarity to one another but a common direction of thrust, namely the intention to give expression to things of the psyche [Seelisches] through form alone.Collection: Expression
My paintings are not meant to be tasted.Collection: Painting