Top 180 Quotes & Sayings by Claude Monet - Page 2

It's the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.

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

I had so much fire in me and so many plans.

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.

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.

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

My heart is forever in Giverny.

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

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 in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.

I'm continuing to work hard, not without periods of discouragement, but my strength comes back again.

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

the more I live, the more I regret how little i know

Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue: it's enchanting, it's delicious, and I hope it will please you.

I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.

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

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.

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

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

When I work I forget all the rest.

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.

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

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.

One can do something if one can see and understand it.

My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.

Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red...But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections.

One day Boudin said to me, 'Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky.' I took his advice.

The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit.

I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics.

A good impression is lost so quickly.

Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.

I'm working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.

The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.

If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!

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

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.

I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.

Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room.

I haven't many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.

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

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

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

If only the weather would improve, there'd be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.

I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.

I can only draw what I see.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.

It's enough to drive you crazy, trying to depict the weather, the atmosphere, the ambience.

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.

The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.

Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.

When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.

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.

I'm knocked out, I've never felt so physically and mentally exhausted, I'm quite stupid with it and long only for bed; but I am happy.

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 sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good.

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

I haven't yet managed to capture the colour of this landscape; there are moments when I'm appalled at the colours I'm having to use, I'm afraid what I'm doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.

I still don't know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.