Edvard Munch Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

My will exceeds my talents.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 illness, I could never have accomplished all I have

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

If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it.

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

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

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

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

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.