Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
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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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In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?
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Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
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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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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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The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
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Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
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The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.
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The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
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Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.
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It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.