Best 81 quotes of Edgar Degas on MyQuotes

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.

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.

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

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

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.

A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.

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?

Art is really a battle.

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.

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.

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

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.

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.

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

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

Drawing is your understanding of form.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

For those who don't know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.

Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.

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.

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.

I don't admit that a woman draws that well!

I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.

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.

If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.

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.

If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun.

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.

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.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.

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.

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.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

It is people's movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree - and so should we.

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.

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

It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

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.

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

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

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

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.'

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

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.

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.

Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.