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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

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.

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

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.

But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.

The Prophet defeated the enemies of Islam even when he and his followers were small in number.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

There are no enemies in science, professor. Only phenomena to study.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Keep your enemies in front of you.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Many have had their greatness made for them by their enemies.

It is not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose.

Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind.