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Degas Quotes



Quotes by Degas - (50 quotes)

Edgar Degas - From the Advice category:

The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Aging category:

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Aging category:

-on his deathbed...
Damn, and just when I was starting to get it! (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Art category:

Art is really a battle. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Art category:

Art isn't something you marry. It's something you rape. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Beauty category:

The most beautiful things in art come from renunciation. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Boredom category:

- The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, 1858 entry...
Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Colour category:

What a horrible thing yellow is. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Commerce category:

There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Communication category:

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too? (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Communication category:

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Composition category:

Even in front of nature one must compose. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Critics category:

They call me the painter of dancers. They don't understand that the dancer has been for me a pretext for painting pretty fabrics and for rendering movement. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Deception category:

'Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Deception category:

A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Deception category:

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Doubt category:

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. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Drawing category:

Make a drawing, begin it again, trace it; begin it again and trace it again. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Drawing category:

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Drawing category:

Drawing is not the same as form; it is a way of seeing form. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Fame category:

I would like to be famous but unknown. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Form category:

Drawing is your understanding of form. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Fun category:

If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Future category:

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. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Gender category:

Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Gender category:

-on Mary Cassatt...
I don't admit that a woman draws that well! (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Imagination category:

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Imagination category:

A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Light category:

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult: the atmosphere of lamps or moonlight. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Masters category:

The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Memory category:

It is very well to copy what one sees; it's much better to draw what one has retained in one's memory. It is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Methodology category:

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Models category:

But it's true, isn't it Pauline, that people imagine that the artists and their models spend their time getting up to all sorts of obscenities? As far as work goes, well, they paint or sculpt when they are tired of enjoying themselves. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Movement category:

People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Muse category:

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Mysteries category:

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Nudes category:

Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Painting category:

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Patience category:

Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Plein-Air category:

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. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Portraiture category:

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Recognition category:

-in later years...
Any reference to him in newspapers or magazines, however well meaning and favourable, threw Degas into a rage and he shut his door for good to the author. 'What a fate!' he complained, 'To be handed over to writers!' (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Rewards category:

I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Sadness category:

...the moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Seeing category:

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Solitude category:

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. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Solitude category:

It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious... he must once more sink himself in solitude. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Spontaneity category:

No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters. Of inspiration, spontaneity and temperament I know nothing. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Truth category:

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs. (Edgar Degas)

Edgar Degas - From the Tyranny category:

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. (Edgar Degas)