French Quotes

Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable.

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

Nature engenders the science of painting.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

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

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

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

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

A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

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.

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

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.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

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

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.