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

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.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man’s urge to open his heart.