Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One never paints violently enough.
When a thing bores you, do not do it.
What I have done cannot be taken from me.
The source of genius is imagination alone.
A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.
A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.
Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born.
What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.
Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
One must learn to be grateful for one's own findings.
We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
Give me some mud, and I will paint you a woman's flesh.
To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.
A wife of your own stature is the greatest of all blessings.
The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.
If I haven't fought for my country at least I'll paint for her.
[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.
Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?
Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.
The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.
It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.
Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.
The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.
One should not be too difficult. An artist should not treat himself like an enemy.
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who can't attain it in anything.
Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.
A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
Glory to that Homer of painting, to that father of warmth and enthusiasm... he really paints men.
A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.
Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.
Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.
The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.
Experience alone can give, even to the greatest talent, that confidence in having done all that could be done.
Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.
The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
God is that inner presence which makes us admire the beautiful and consoles us for not sharing the happiness of the wicked.
Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.
The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.
If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.