Edgar Degas Quotes

Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.

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

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

You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.

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

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

The true traveler never arrives.

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

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

He once said that he wished to be famous, but unknown.

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.

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

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.

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

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

And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.

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

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.

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

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

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

The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.

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.

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.

C'est vrai. Voilá quelqu'un qui sent comme moi. (It is true. There is someone who feels as I do).

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

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

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

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

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.

What a horrible thing yellow is.

We were created to look at one another, weren't we?

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.

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.

There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.

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

Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.

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

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

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.

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.

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

Instantaneity is photography.

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

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.