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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

My will exceeds my talents.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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