Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Edvard Munch

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

My will exceeds my talents.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.