Eugene Delacroix
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.Collection: Art
What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.
If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.
Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.
A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.Collection: Artist
How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?Collection: Beautiful
Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.Collection: Two
Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.Collection: Doe
Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.Collection: Imagination
The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.Collection: Inspirational
We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.Collection: Time
The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.Collection: Art
When a thing bores you, do not do it.Collection: Bores You
Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.Collection: Ideas
Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place. A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.Collection: Character
The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.Collection: Art
[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.Collection: Photography
One never paints violently enough.Collection: Power
Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.Collection: Looks
It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.Collection: Spirit
The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.Collection: Soul
Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.Collection: Art
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.Collection: Body
Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.Collection: Finishing
If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.Collection: Fall
Glory to that Homer of painting, to that father of warmth and enthusiasm... he really paints men.Collection: Appreciation
A wife of your own stature is the greatest of all blessings.Collection: Marriage
One should not be too difficult. An artist should not treat himself like an enemy.Collection: Artist
What I have done cannot be taken from me.Collection: Taken
I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.Collection: Writing
The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.Collection: Art
Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.Collection: Sublime
We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.Collection: Believe
There is a man whose qualities can be savored by people who are getting old... The painter qualities are carried to the highest point in his work: what he does is done - through and through; when he paints eyes, they are lit with the fire of life.Collection: Eye
In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?Collection: Art
The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.Collection: Artist
Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.Collection: Color
Take hold of objects by their centres, not by their lines of contour... The contour accentuated uniformly and beyond proportion, destroys plasticity, bringing forward those parts of an object which are always most distant from the eye - namely its outlines.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Photography
If painters left nothing of themselves after their deaths, so that we were obliged to rank them as we do actors according to the judgment of their contemporaries, how different their reputations would be from what posterity has made them!Collection: Different
I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.Collection: Race
Give me some mud, and I will paint you a woman's flesh.Collection: Giving
Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.Collection: Art
Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.Collection: Beauty
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who can't attain it in anything.Collection: Art
You increase your self-respect when you feel you've done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.Collection: Happiness