Edvard Munch - Life Quotes

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It was the period I think of as the age of the pillow... What I wanted to bring out - is that which cannot be measured - I wanted to bring out the tired movement in the eyelids - the lips must look as though they are whispering - she must look as though she is breathing - I want life - what is alive.

Edvard Munch
When I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look on these notes as confessions. I have chosen – in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard – to split the work into two parts; the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonarda da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is the universal in the soul.

Edvard Munch
My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship... My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life - it is, therefore, actually a sort of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity.

Edvard Munch
Life here [in Paris, 1885] is quite different. You hardly ever see a dog on a lead; you come across little wagons being pulled by dogs that are often so small that you can't imagine how on earth they manage to shift such enormous weights. You see shepherdesses in the middle of the street herding goats and sometimes playing on their flutes. I think I'll go to the Louvre and the Salon today.

Edvard Munch
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.

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

Edvard Munch
What is art really? The outcome of dissatisfaction with life, the point of impact for the creative force, the continual movement of life.... in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.

Edvard Munch
I have been given a unique role to play on this earth: given to me by a life filled with sickness, ill-starred circumstances and my profession as an artist. It is a life that contains nothing that resembles happiness, and moreover does not even desire happiness.

Edvard Munch
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.

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

Edvard Munch