Claude Monet Quotes
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Everything changes, even stone.
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Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.
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I do have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La Grenouillère, for which I've done some bad pochades (sketches), but it is a dream. Renoir, who have just spent a couple of months here, also wants to paint this subject.
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I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.
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Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
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Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.
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I didn't become one.. .As long as I can remember I've always been one.
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It would be a very bad idea... to exhibit even a small number of this new series, as the whole effect can only be achieved from an exhibition of the entire group.
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I am pleased with the exhibition... everything on display was sold for a good price to decent people. It has been a long time since I believed that you could educate public taste.
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When I work I forget all the rest.
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These palms are driving me crazy; the motifs are extremely difficult to seize, to put on canvas; it's so bushy everywhere, although delightful to the eye.. .I would like to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but cannot find them as I would like.
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The more I live, the more I regret how little i know.
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I felt the need, in order to widen my field of observation and to refresh my vision in front of new sights, to take myself away for a while from the area where I was living, and to make some trips lasting several weeks in Normandy, Brittany and elsewhere..
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Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
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I tell myself that anyone who says he has finished a canvas is terribly arrogant. Finished means complete, perfect, and I toil away without making any progress, searching, fumbling around, without achieving anything much.
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Did not Troyon tell me to enter the studio of Couture in Paris? It is needless to tell you how decided was my refusal to do so. I admit even that it cooled me, temporarily at least, in my esteem and admiration of Troyon.. ..and I after all, connected myself only with artists who were seeking.
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Nature won't be summoned to order and won't be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.
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I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
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Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.
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My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.
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To me the motif itself is an insignificant factor; what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me.. .Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat.. .I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found - the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible.
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It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
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I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
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I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.