Best 70 quotes of Marcel Duchamp on MyQuotes

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.

Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.

An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

Chess is a sport. A violent sport.

Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

Humor is the only reason to live.

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do.

I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.

I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it has been so discredited. So I want to get rid of it. There is an unnecessary adoration of ‘art’ today.

If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.

I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.

I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.

In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society

In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.

I thought to discourage aesthetics... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.

I was poking fun at myself most of all.

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see

No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

Since I found that one could make a case shadow from a three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we are not familiar with.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.

Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count, because there is no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this, because it has nothing to do with him.

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.