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

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

Without fear and disease, my life would be like a boat without oars.

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.

We don’t see clearly because we don’t see with the eyes of our heart.

If you want to avoid seeing an idiot, break the mirror.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.

Their parents were told: “You will never see them again.

When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster. I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That’s the story.

We like to see others, but don’t like others to see through us.

We cannot see what we don’t believe.