We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expre….

The world is rather shot to pieces [end of World War II - 1945], but the spectators climb out of their caves and pretend to have again become normal ….

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

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

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….

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

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

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….

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….

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

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….

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..

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….