Portrait of Johanna Staude (1917) by Gustav Klimt - Poster

“Beauty is always strange. I do not mean that it is deliberately, coldly strange, for in that case it would be a monster off the rails of life. I say that it always contains a little strangeness, a naive strangeness.”

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”

“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“Art is the reflection that the dazzled human soul gives back of the splendor of the beautiful.”

“Sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures which master one's sight. They flood one's consciousness.”

“Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to one another.”

“Tears fall in my heart as rain falls on the town.”

“Art is born of constraints, lives of struggles, and dies of freedom.”

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”

“One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“Art hovers around the truth, but with the firm intention not to burn itself.”

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

“Genius is childhood rediscovered at will.”

“If the world were clear, art would not be.”

“To create is always to speak of childhood.”

“The sky is pretty like an angel.”

“Only children know what they are looking for.”