Top 17 Quotes & Sayings by Oskar Kokoschka

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka.

Last updated on December 20, 2024.

Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.

Austrian - Artist | March 1, 1886 - February 22, 1980

Source: Wikipedia

Intellectually, I am already an old man. But in the sensory area, I am still such a child! I shuffle on my bottom between the two.

Oskar Kokoschka

There is no such thing as a German, French, or Anglo-American Expressionism! There are only young people trying to find their bearings in the world.

Oskar Kokoschka

All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.

Oskar Kokoschka

The mystery of the soul is like that of a closed door. When you open it, you see something which was not there before.

Oskar Kokoschka

I consider myself responsible to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life.

Oskar Kokoschka

The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven in all its imagery. Therefore, we must listen closely to our inner voice.

Oskar Kokoschka

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

Oskar Kokoschka

However ugly a face may be, we can discover some beauty in it if we first experience wonder before it and then begin to understand it, too.

Oskar Kokoschka

Consciousness is the grave of things, the place where they cease to exist, beyond which they end. And when they have ended, it seems that they no longer have any essential existence except in the visions in me.

Oskar Kokoschka

I cannot say why I wanted to paint. The only answer is in the pictures themselves.

Oskar Kokoschka

The most fundamental in me is coming uppermost, and the transient, the sensational, is dispersing, because it can't adversely influence what is essential to me.

Oskar Kokoschka

True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world.

Oskar Kokoschka

Open your eyes at last and see... now I will open the book of the world for you,there are no words in it, just pictures.

Oskar Kokoschka

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

Oskar Kokoschka

I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams.

Oskar Kokoschka

The awareness of imagery is part of living... a life which derives its power from within itself will focus on the perception... of images.

Oskar Kokoschka

Consciousness is a sea ringed with visions.

Oskar Kokoschka