“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.”

Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have.

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

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.

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.

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.

Enrich your soul in the great goodness of God: The Father is your table, the Son is your food, and the Holy Spirit waits on you and then makes His dwelling in you.

When we have been to Holy Communion, the balm of love envelops the soul as the flower envelops the bee.

Upon receiving Holy Communion, the Adorable Blood of Jesus Christ really flows in our veins and His Flesh is really blended with ours.

Holiness does not consist in mystic speculations, enthusiastic fervours, or uncommanded austerities; it consists in thinking as God thinks, and willing as God wills.

Prayer is a new, gracious, lasting will of the soul united and fast-bound to the will of God by the precious and mysterious working of the Holy Ghost.

God gives each one of us sufficient grace ever to know His holy will, and to do it fully.

All of us can attain to Christian virtue and holiness, no matter in what condition of life we live and no matter what our life work may be.

How happy is that guardian angel who accompanies a soul to Holy Mass!