“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.”

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart’s blood. Art is your heart’s blood.

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.

Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.

The higher the goal, the harder the climb, but after that the bigger the muscle the, smarter the mind.

You can’t plow a field simply by turning it over in your mind.

The time to make up your mind about people is never.

The secret of happiness is in a cheerful, contented mind. He is poor who is dissatisfied; he is rich who is contented with what he has, and can enjoy what others own.

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it including the thorns.

Let every man mind his own business.