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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Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
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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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What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
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The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
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Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
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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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Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
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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.
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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.
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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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A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
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Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.
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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.
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We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
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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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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.
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Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
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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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Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
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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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I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.
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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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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.