“The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.”

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.

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.

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day’s end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.

I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

If an incompetent chieftain is removed, seldom do we appoint his highest-ranking subordinate to his place

It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.

Let us not doubt that God has a father’s pity towards us, and that in the removal of that which is dearest to us He is still loving and kind.

Our efforts to remove hatred and indifference from the world begin by trying to remove them from our own mind.

Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.