Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Eugene Delacroix

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

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

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

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

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

A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

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.

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.

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.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

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

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.

We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.

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

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.

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

Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.

The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.

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

The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

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.

A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.

Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.

How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?

Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.

Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.

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.

One never paints violently enough.

Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.

The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.

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.

Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.

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

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.

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.

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

Commonplace people have an answer for everything and nothing ever surprises them. They try to look as though they knew what you were about to say better than you did yourself, and when it is their turn to speak, they repeat with great assurance something that they have heard other people say, as though it were their own invention.

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.

Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place. A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.

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

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.

There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.

They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.

When a thing bores you, do not do it.

The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.

In abandoning the vagueness of the sketch the artist shows more of his personality by revealing the range but also the limitations of his talent.

It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.

What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.

God is that inner presence which makes us admire the beautiful and consoles us for not sharing the happiness of the wicked.

A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.

If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.

If I haven't fought for my country at least I'll paint for her.

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

To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.