“The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.”

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.

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.

Without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

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.

Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Photography is an art which touches and grips one’s own heart’s blood.

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.

Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being… You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

It is no coincidence that one cardinal rule in brainwashing is to remove from the victim all photographs of himself and people he has known.

The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.

The universe will always remove what is no longer serving you.

Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.