Eugene Delacroix Quotes - Page 2

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

You increase your self-respect when you feel you've done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.

Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

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

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

One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.

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

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

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.

It is often we come the closest to the essence of an artist... in his or her pocket notebooks and travel sketchbooks... where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight into the magical mind of a working artist.

Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.

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.

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.

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

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

Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.

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

Can any man say with certainty that he was happy at a particular moment of time which he remembers as being delightful? Remembering it certainly makes him happy, because he realizes how happy he could have been, but at the actual moment when the alleged happiness was occurring, did he really feel happy? He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried.

As for the ridiculous fear of making things below one's potential abilities... No, there is the root of the evil. There is the hiding place of stupidity I must attack: vain mortal, you are limited by nothing.

A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.

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

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.