In so far as he is a creator, the artist does not belong to a social group already moulded by a culture, but to a culture which he is by way of building up.
An art book is a museum without walls.
And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.
All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.
In the realm of human destiny, the depth of man’s questionings is more important than his answers.
Here, reality is not subordinated to painting, indeed painting seems the handmaid of reality, though we feel it tending towards a procedure which, while not at the mercy of appearances, is not yet in conflict with them.
You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them.
The mind supplies the idea of a nation, but what gives this idea its sentimental force is a community of dreams.
If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?
If we cannot shape our destiny there as no such thing as witchcraft.
Man knows that the world is not made on a human scale; and he wishes that it were.
Be careful – with quotations, you can damn anything.
The truth of a man is first and foremost what he hides.
Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.
In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home to us the presence of that creative power throughout the whole history of art.
Athirst for personal salvation, the West forgets that many religions had but a vague notion of the life beyond the grave; true, all great religions stake a claim on eternity, but not necessarily on man’s eternal life.