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A painter may know what he doesn't want. But woe be to him if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself.

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More quotes by Max Ernst

Max Ernst died the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time.

A painter may know what he does not want.

Woman's nakedness is wiser than the teachings of the philosophers. [the title of his essay]

But it is of the past, it seems to me. Perhaps.. .Man and the nightingales were in the most favourable situation for imagining: for them the forest was a perfect dream-conductor..

The mysteries of the forest (1934)

Studies in painting: Non. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist, and even the expression 'self-taught' is a phony, he thinks.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Max Ernst (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.