“Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.”

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.

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.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It’s simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.

No nation ever taxed itself into prosperity.

Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots, as freedom is to slavery.

There is nothing wrong with a life of peace and prosperity. I suggest you think about what it is that you want from your life, and why.

Society can’t function without shared prosperity.

Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.

There is no knowledge and science like pondering and thought; and there is no prosperity and advancement like knowledge and science.

I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people.

The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.