Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Edgar Degas

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

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

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

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

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

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

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

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

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 really a battle.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

One does not marry art. One ravishes it.

Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

The true traveler never arrives.

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.

I should like to be famous and unknown.

People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.

Drawing is your understanding of form.

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

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.

We were created to look at one another, weren't we?

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.

If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun.

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.

C'est vrai. Voilá quelqu'un qui sent comme moi. (It is true. There is someone who feels as I do).

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.

He once said that he wished to be famous, but unknown.

I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.

Instantaneity is photography.

Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.

Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

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.

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

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.

You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means.

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.

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

It is people's movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree - and so should we.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

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

It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious... he must once more sink himself in solitude.

For those who don't know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.

Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.

If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.

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