“The way one sees is also dependent upon one’s emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways, and this is what makes art so interesting.”

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.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.

Be of one mind and one faith, that you may conquer your enemies and lead long and happy lives.

A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

The calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control.

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

No Limits Have Been Fixed To Your Mind. You Can Make It Mundane Or Magical.

Courage consists not in hazarding without fear, but being resolutely minded in a just cause.