23 Quotes by Oskar Kokoschka

Consciousness is the grave of things, the place where they cease to exist, beyond which they end. And when they have ended, it seems that they no longer have any essential existence except in the visions in me.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

Consciousness is a sea ringed with visions.

However ugly a face may be, we can discover some beauty in it if we first experience wonder before it and then begin to understand it, too.

I cannot say why I wanted to paint.The only answer is in the pictures themselves.

Open your eyes at last and see...now I will open the book of the world for you,there are no words in it,just pictures

True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man’s timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.