I am sure of one thing: many silent readers and young people full of energy will secretly be grateful to us, will be fired by enthusiasm for this boo… - Franz Marc

For days I have seen nothing but the most awful scenes that the human mind can imagine.. .Stay calm and don't worry: I will come back to you – the war will end this year. I must stop; the transport of the wounded, which will take this letter along, is leaving. Stay well and calm as I do. [from the battlefield at Verdun]

The day is not far distant on which Europeans – the few Europeans who will still remain – will suddenly become painfully aware of their lack of formal concepts. Then will these unhappy people bewail their wretched state and become seekers after form. They will not seek the new form in the past, in the outward world, or in the stylized appearances of nature, but they will build up their form from within themselves, in the light of their new knowledge that turned the old world fable into a world form, and the old world view into a world insight. [written at the front of World War 1. - near Verdun, 1915]

I make the most outrageous demands on my imagination and leave aside everything else, theory and nature study, as other people understand them. This is the only way I can work, drawing on nothing but my own faculty of imagination with I feed without stint – except in working hours.