Claude Monet Quotes - Page 3

My life has been nothing but a failure.

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.

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

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

All of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was.

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.

I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.

It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again.

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.

My aim is to give you only the things with which I am completely satisfied, even if it means asking you a little more [time] for them... for if I were to do otherwise I'd turn into a mere painting machine and you would be landed with a pile of incomplete work which would put off the most enthusiastic of art collectors.

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

Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.

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

I see less and less... I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.

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.

Lots of people will protest that it's quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

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

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

A good impression is lost so quickly.

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