“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.”

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.

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.

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

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.

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.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It’s simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.

The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.

An artist, if he is truly an artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men, to have mankind and womankind realize that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.

Aging is a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.

For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but of power and of love and of calm and well balanced mind and discipline and self-control.

The power of God is with you at all times; through the activities of mind, senses, breathing, and emotions; and is constantly doing all the work using you as a mere instrument.

Do not worry about anything, but pray and ask God for everything you need, always giving thanks. And God’s peace, which is so great we cannot understand it, will keep your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ.

Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.

The peace of God is with them whose mind and soul are in harmony, who are free from desire and wrath, who know their own soul.