EDVARD MUNCH

Enneagram Type 4 (The Individualist) with a 5 Wing

Anders Beer Wilse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Edvard Munch quotes that show he is a Type 4

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

  • "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."

  • "Without fear and illness, I would have been like a ship without a rudder."

  • "I paint to record my own state of being and the passage of time, which deepens the colors."

  • "Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul."

  • "Illness, insanity, and death are the black angels that guarded my cradle."

  • "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."

  • "In my art, I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself."

  • "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."

  • "We want to get to the core of life through art, shedding all false facades."

  • "Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light."

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

  • "A German once said to me: 'But you paint only souls.' That's right; the soul is more interesting than the body."

  • "Art comes from joy and pain... But mostly from pain."