Edgar Degas
Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.Collection: Long
Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?Collection: Art
The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.Collection: Art
Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.Collection: Beautiful
People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.Collection: People
There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.Collection: Success
A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.Collection: Vices
It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.Collection: Battle
Drawing is your understanding of form.Collection: Drawing
So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.Collection: Running
I put it [picture "A still life of a pear" by Edouard Manet] there [on the wall, next to the picture "Jupiter and Thetis" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres], for a pear like that would overthrow any god.Collection: Wall
Even in front of nature one must compose.Collection: Composition
Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.Collection: Art
Art is really a battle.Collection: Art
And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.Collection: Heart
Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.Collection: Hate
Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.Collection: Important
What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.Collection: Two
One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.Collection: Art
I would like to be famous but unknown.Collection: Fame
A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.Collection: Work Out
I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.Collection: Art
What a horrible thing yellow is.Collection: Yellow
There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.Collection: Women
I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!Collection: Beautiful
The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.Collection: Giving
I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.Collection: Inspiration
The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.Collection: Air
The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.Collection: Air
I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture.Collection: Wife
If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn't want anyone killed. I'd be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.Collection: Eye
Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'Collection: Beautiful
Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.Collection: Art
I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.Collection: People
I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.Collection: Art
One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.Collection: Invention
Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.Collection: Boredom
The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.Collection: Shining
It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.Collection: Talent
Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.Collection: Expression
Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movementCollection: Art
Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.Collection: Light
the moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.Collection: Art
I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things.Collection: Stuff
I don't admit that a woman draws that well!Collection: Gender
Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.Collection: Attitude
These women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition... it is as though one were watching through a keyhole.Collection: Simple
Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.Collection: Expression
A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.Collection: Artist