Max Beckmann

"All important things in art since Ur of the Chaldea's, since Tel Halaf and Crete, have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all object…"

".. in itself is one of the manifestations of life, like disease, love, and lust. And just as I follow fear, disease, lust, love, and hate to their utmost limits, well, now I am trying war. It is all l…"

"If one perceives of it all – the entire War or even life as a whole – as a scene in the theater of 'infinity', many things are much easier to bear."

"'Departure' , yes departure from the illusion of life toward the essential things that wait behind appearance.. .We must insist that Departure is not bound to a political trend, but is symbolic for al…"

"My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesqu…"

"I have such a passion for painting! I am continually working at form. In actual drawing and in my head, and during my sleep. Sometimes I think I shall go mad, this painful, sensual pleasures tires and…"

"The trenches wound in meandering lines and white faces peered from dark dugouts – a lot of men were still preparing the positions, and everywhere among them there were graves. Where they sat, beside t…"

"The world is rather shot to pieces , but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal and customary humans who ask each other's pardon instead of eating one another …"