Edgar Degas Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. If then two or three natural accents can be added, obviously no harm is done. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

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

Drawing is your understanding of form.

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

I put it [picture "A still life of a pear" by Edouard Manet] there [on the wall, next to the picture "Jupiter and Thetis" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres], for a pear like that would overthrow any god.

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

Even in front of nature one must compose.

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.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Art is really a battle.

Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.

Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

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.

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

I would like to be famous but unknown.

I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.

I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.

What a horrible thing yellow is.