Edvard Munch Quotes

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.

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.

It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.

Without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.

From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

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.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

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.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

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.

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

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

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

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.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

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

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.

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.

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.

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.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

Without fear and disease, my life would be like a boat without oars.

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.

My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

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

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us - I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me - and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea - I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding - because the threads could not be severed.

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

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

Your face encompasses the beauty of the whole earth. Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. It is the smile of a corpse. Now the hand of death touches life. The chain is forged that links the thousand families that are dead to the thousand generations to come.

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

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

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.

My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50...I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor