Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.
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Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.
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Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
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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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What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
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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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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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We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
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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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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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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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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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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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Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
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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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A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
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Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.
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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.
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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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It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.
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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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The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.
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Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
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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.