Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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If painters left nothing of themselves after their deaths, so that we were obliged to rank them as we do actors according to the judgment of their contemporaries, how different their reputations would be from what posterity has made them!
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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.
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Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.
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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.
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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.
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We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.
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The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.
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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.
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There is a man whose qualities can be savored by people who are getting old... The painter qualities are carried to the highest point in his work: what he does is done - through and through; when he paints eyes, they are lit with the fire of life.
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Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
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It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.
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One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.
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Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
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Delsarte tells me that Mozart stole outrageously from Galuppi, in the same way, I suppose, that Molière stole from anybody anywhere, if he found something work taking. I said that what was Mozart had not been stolen from Galuppi, or from anyone else for that matter.
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Let a man of genius make use of photography as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.
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Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
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The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.
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Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
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Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
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The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
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All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective.
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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.
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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.
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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.