Edvard Munch Quotes Page 2

“My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.”

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

“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.”

“The sea – it is as incomprehensible as existence – it is incomprehensible as death – as eternal as longing.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”