Edvard Munch Quotes

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

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

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

Human fates are like planets

Like a star that emerges
from the dark –
and meets another star –
shines for a second before disappearing again
into the dark – [it is] in this way – in this way
a man and a woman meet – glide towards
one another are illuminated in love's
flames – to then disappear
in their separate directions –
Only a few meet in a
single large blaze – where they both
can be fully united

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.

Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? ... my art gives meaning to my life.

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.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red ... I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

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

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

My will exceeds my talents.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous infinite scream of nature.

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

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

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

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 was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

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