Art Quotes

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."

"For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite."

"Sculpture is a brutal art... it is too clear, it shows too much, it leaves nothing to the imagination."

"A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound?"

"The beautiful is always strange. I do not mean that it is coldly, voluntarily strange... but that it always contains a little distinctness, a little novelty."

"The irregular is the unexpected, the surprise, the astonishment; and the astonishment is an essential part of the sensation of the beautiful."

"He who does not possess the memory of the heart will never learn the rhetoric of the brain."

"In matters of art, I admit that I am an aristocrat; I love only the rare, the difficult, the exceptional."

"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

"Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."

"Truth and Beauty are two distinct things... Truth has nothing to do with songs. All that constitutes the grace, the charm, the irresistible beauty of a song, would be taken away from it if it were stripped of its rhythm and its rhyme."

"It is the imagination that has taught man the moral meaning of color, of contour, of sound, and of scent. In the beginning of the world there was no such thing as association or analogy."

"The great tradition has got lost, and the new one is not yet made."

"If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally."

"The duality of art is a fatal consequence of the duality of man."

"To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons."

"The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should only paint according to what he sees and what he feels. He must be really true to his own nature."

"It is true that the great tradition has disappeared, and that the curiosity of the public... has replaced the love of the beautiful."

"A picture is a machine, all of whose systems of construction are intelligible to the practised eye; where everything has its reason for existence."

"Poetry has no other goal but itself... If a poet has pursued a moral aim, he has diminished his poetic force; and it is not imprudent to wager that his work will be bad."

"The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value."

"Caricature is a double thing; it is both drawing and idea—the drawing violent, the idea caustic and veiled."

"Imagination is the queen of faculties. It has decomposed all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and arranged in accordance with rules whose origin one cannot find in the deepest recesses of the soul, it creates a new world."

"There are no such things as good or bad subjects; in art, the subject is nothing, or at least, the subject is only a pretext for the artist's genius."

"Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it... but no one would think of composing a dictionary as a composition."

"What is pure art according to the modern conception? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself."

"Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-à-brac that the natural life accumulates."

"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."

"Every old master has had his own modernity."

"In the beginning was the Deed, says Goethe. But in the beginning was the Word, says the Scripture. In the beginning was the Line, says the Draftsman."

"I have found the definition of the Beautiful—of my Beautiful. It is something ardent and sad... a mystery, a regret."

"The phrase 'chic'—that dreadful and bizarre word of modern invention—does not designate things, but rather the absence of things, the void, the nothingness."

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."