Eugene Delacroix Quotes

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.

A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

One never paints violently enough.

Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.

A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.

To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.

Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.

One must learn to be grateful for one's own findings.

Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.

I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.

Always, at the back of your soul, there is something that says to you, 'Mortal, drawn from eternal life for a short time, think how precious these moments are.

The more an object is polished or brilliant, the less you see its own color and the more it becomes a mirror reflecting the color of its surroundings.

If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.

God is that inner presence which makes us admire the beautiful and consoles us for not sharing the happiness of the wicked.

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

I believe it safe to say that all progress must lead, not to further progress, but finally to the negation of progress, a return to the point of departure.

A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.

The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.

It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

The source of genius is imagination alone.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.

Give me some mud, and I will paint you a woman's flesh.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who can't attain it in anything.

Every time I await a model, even when I am most pressed to time, I am overjoyed when the time comes and I tremble when I hear the key turn in the door.

Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.

Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.

Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.

The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.

Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.

One should not be too difficult. An artist should not treat himself like an enemy.

Experience alone can give, even to the greatest talent, that confidence in having done all that could be done.

Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.

The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.

What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.

When a thing bores you, do not do it.

Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born.

At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.

What I have done cannot be taken from me.