Claude Monet Quotes

I'm knocked out, I've never felt so physically and mentally exhausted, I'm quite stupid with it and long only for bed; but I am happy.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

When I work I forget all the rest.

I'm in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

One day Boudin said to me, 'Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky.' I took his advice.

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.

I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good.

I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.

I am pleased with the exhibition... everything on display was sold for a good price to decent people. It has been a long time since I believed that you could educate public taste.

One's better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one.

The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit.

the more I live, the more I regret how little i know

I can only draw what I see.

If only the weather would improve, there'd be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.

Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.

The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.

I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics.

My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment.

I still don't know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.

While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.

My life has been nothing but a failure.

The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.

I'm getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but... I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me.

Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.

I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.

I have once more taken up things that can't be done: water with grasses weaving on the bottom. But I'm always tackling that sort of thing!

It would be a very bad idea... to exhibit even a small number of this new series, as the whole effect can only be achieved from an exhibition of the entire group.

It's the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.

Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.

Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.

I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.

I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.

Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room.

The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.

I've been working so hard that I'm exhausted... I feel I won't be able to do without a few weeks' rest, so I'm going off to see the sea.

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.

I've said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him. I came to be fascinated by his studies, the products of what I call instantaneity.

I never draw except with brush and paint.

I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.

It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written - but then, try to do it!

Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I'm exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I've set out to do.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.