“Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.”

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.

I had only planned to strike the gong violently in order to somehow shake people up and make them more aware. I think I succeeded.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

The best way to begin is to say: ‘Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings’.

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of…kitsch.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

Education is a work of self-organization by which man adapts himself to the conditions of life.

It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one’s self to others.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‘renouncing’ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in the usual meaning of the words.

Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.