40 Inspirational Edvard Munch Quotes [2024]

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Updated: January 20th, 2022

Edvard Munch was an iconic painter from Norway.

He is really well-known for his iconic artwork, [The Scream]{https://www.edvardmunch.org/the-scream.jsp}, an artwork that is one of the most evocative human figures in the history of western art.

It is actually based upon Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature.

We've put together an incredible collection of Edvard Munch quotes to read.

Here they are:

40 Inspirational Edvard Munch Quotes [2024]

List of Inspiring Edward Munch Quotes

I was walking along the road 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.”

The sea – it is as incomprehensible as existence – it is incomprehensible as death – as eternal as longing.”

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

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.”

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

Human fates are like planets Like a star that emerges from the dark – and meets another star – shines for a second before disappearing again into the dark – [it is] in this way – in this way a man and a woman meet – glide towards one another are illuminated in love’s flames – to then disappear in their separate directions – Only a few meet in a single large blaze – where they both can be fully united”

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.”

I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us - I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me - and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea - I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding - because the threads could not be severed.”

The camera will never compete with the brush and palette until such time as photography can be taken to Heaven or Hell.”

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

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 myself and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”

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

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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

I build a kind of wall between myself and the model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.”

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.”

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything anymore. 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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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

My will exceeds my talents.”

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

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”

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

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.”

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.”

“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” ― Edvard Munch

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that ia eternity.” ― Edvard Munch

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Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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