“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 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.

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.

My will exceeds my talents.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.

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.

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories – those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

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.

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

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

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.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future,and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now.

Know the philosophy, know the details, and ignore everything in the middle.

Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding.

Every successful sports season I had included detailed daily itineraries. We received one in the morning and one before practice, and they set us up to win.

A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.

I’m not one of those people that goes into details of my personal life on national TV to get attention. Some things are better left unsaid.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.