Marc Chagall
Work isn't to make money; you work to justify life.Collection: Work
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.Collection: Love
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.Collection: Art
Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.Collection: Love
Great art picks up where nature ends.Collection: Art
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.Collection: Marriage
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.Collection: Imagination
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.
The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.
Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of loveCollection: Art
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.Collection: Healing
If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.Collection: Moving
Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.Collection: Art
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.Collection: Art
Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.Collection: Life
The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.Collection: Freedom
All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.Collection: Reality
You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies.Collection: Flower
For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.Collection: Heart
If I create with my heart almost all my intentions remain. If it is with the head - almost nothing. An artist must not fear to be himself, to express only himself. If he is absolutely and entirely sincere, what he says and does will be acceptable to others.Collection: Heart
My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.Collection: Emotional
Color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.Collection: Color
I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.Collection: Littles
Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.Collection: Art
The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.Collection: Stars
Time is a river without banks.Collection: Time
Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?Collection: Prayer
What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint.Collection: Genius
We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.Collection: Artist
My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.Collection: Stars
Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul.Collection: Soul
Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.Collection: Hands
To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.Collection: Understanding Nature
If I weren't a Jew then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.Collection: Artist
The habit of ignoring Nature is deeply implanted in our times. This attitude reminds me of people who never look you in the eye; I find them disturbing and always have to look away.Collection: Nature
What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.Collection: Mean
On cannot be precise, and still be true.Collection: Truth
You cannot explain me with "isms." They are very bad for an artist. What one must believe in is color.Collection: Art
I've always painted pictures in which human love floods my colors.Collection: Color
In my youth, poverty enriched me, but now I can afford wealth.Collection: Adversity
Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.Collection: Art
Changes in societal structure and in art would possess more credibility if they had their origins in the soul and spirit. If people read the words of the prophets with closer attention, they would find the keys to life.Collection: Art
Mine alone is the country of my soul.Collection: Country
Color is everything. When color is right, form is right.Collection: Color
If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.Collection: May
Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.Collection: Art
Can my words distill for you a little sweetness, tender and caressing?Collection: Littles
I am working in Paris . I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.Collection: Reality