I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradation….

The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut..

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art..

What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us..

All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being..

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protec….

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting..

The greatest mystery of all is reality..

Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, (Beckmann lived in the center of Amsterdam during World War 2.) an enormous old tobacco storer….

As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing coul….

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play..

Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome..

My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entranc….

The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what ….

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality..

Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained..

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality..

What is important to me in my work is the identity that is hidden behind so-called reality. I search for a bridge from the given present tot the invi….

One thing is sure - we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas.. ..To transform three i….

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement..

I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality..