Edgar Degas famous quotes

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
-- Edgar Degas

#Beauty #Dance #Art

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Cutting #Artist #Winning

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

#Art #Experience #Painting

I want to be famous but unknown!
-- Edgar Degas

#Want

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

#Art #Reflection #Study

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

#Art #Doe #Painting

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Memories #Imagination #Transformation

One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Future #Creating

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

#Artist #Twenties #Fifty

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Mean #Giving

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

#Night #Long #Together

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

#Art #People #Littles

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

#Art #Movement #Hundred

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

#Drawing

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#One Day #May

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

#Beautiful #Artist #Taste

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

#Drawing #Way #Form

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

#Understanding #Charming #Conversation

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
-- Edgar Degas

#Success #Panic #Kind

A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.
-- Edgar Degas

#Work Out #Deception #Crime

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

#Writing #Artist #Drawing

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

#Artist #Looks

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

#Photography #Atmosphere #Lamps

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

#Art #Vices #Art Is

And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.
-- Edgar Degas

#Heart #Shoes #Dancing

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

#Real #Communication #Half

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

#Mean #Ideas #Giving

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.
-- Edgar Degas

#Light #Etc #Evening

What a horrible thing yellow is.
-- Edgar Degas

#Yellow #Horrible

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.
-- Edgar Degas

#Attitude #People #Typical

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Strong #Mean

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

#Artist #Criminals #Spirit

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Battle #Details #Lines

I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture.
-- Edgar Degas

#Wife #Littles #Might

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

#Long

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

#Bored #Style #Found

I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things.
-- Edgar Degas

#Stuff #Insurance Companies #Company

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.
-- Edgar Degas

#Two #Drawing #Different

Drawing is your understanding of form.
-- Edgar Degas

#Drawing #Understanding #Form

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

#Fun #Painting #Difficult

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.
-- Edgar Degas

#Inspiration #Drawing #Looks

I would like to be famous but unknown.
-- Edgar Degas

#Fame

I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Attitude #Brutality

I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Reflection #Doubt

The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.
-- Edgar Degas

#Air #Doors #Breathe

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

#Men #Artist #Effort

Even in front of nature one must compose.
-- Edgar Degas

#Composition

Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.
-- Edgar Degas

#Hate #Forgive Me #Forgiving

I don't admit that a woman draws that well!
-- Edgar Degas

#Gender #Wells #Draws

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Imagination #Mind #Use

the moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Sadness #Littles

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.
-- Edgar Degas

#People #Solitude #Suffering

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

#Beautiful #Horse #Jockeys

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.
-- Edgar Degas

#Expression #People #Giving

If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn't want anyone killed. I'd be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.
-- Edgar Degas

#Eye #Government #People

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

#Patience #Path #Great Patience

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

#Artist #Solitude #Wish

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

#Truth #Needs #Ugly

One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.
-- Edgar Degas

#Invention #Tyranny #Recollection

The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.
-- Edgar Degas

#Air #Painting #Breathe

There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.
-- Edgar Degas

#Gossip #People #Competition

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Beauty #Simple #Occupation

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Movement #Should

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Girl #Lying #Clothes

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Intelligent #Thinking

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Vices #Doe

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

#Running #Telephones #Rings

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

#Feels

I put it (a still life of a pear, made by Manet, ed.) there (on the wall, next to Ingres' Jupiter, ed.), for a pear like that would overthrow any god.
-- Edgar Degas

#Wall #Artist #Jupiter

I should like to be famous and unknown.
-- Edgar Degas

#Artist #Should

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?
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Stupid #Thinking

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Artist #Waste #Wasting Time

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.
-- Edgar Degas

#Vices #Knavery #Add

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'
-- Edgar Degas

#Beautiful #Art #Horse

A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.
-- Edgar Degas

#Artist #Imagination #Firsts

Art is really a battle.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Battle #Art Is

The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.
-- Edgar Degas

#Giving #Advice #Secret

There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.
-- Edgar Degas

#Women #Should

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

#Intelligence

Instantaneity is photography.
-- Edgar Degas

#Photography

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.
-- Edgar Degas

#Boredom #Overcoming #Contemplating

One does not marry art. One ravishes it.
-- Edgar Degas

#Inspirational #Art #Doe

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. If then two or three natural accents can be added, obviously no harm is done. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.
-- Edgar Degas

#Art #Two #Air

The frame is the reward of the artist.
-- Edgar Degas

#Artist #Rewards

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

#Art #Artist #Doe

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

#People #Dancer #Wish

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

#Dance #Heroic