Auguste Rodin Quotes
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Patience is also a form of action.
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The great difficulty and crowning glory of art is to paint, to draw, to write, naturally and simply.
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To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.
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Now color - it is to this remark that I wished to lead - is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh.
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I obey nature, I never presume to command her. The first principal in art is to copy what one sees.
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For to me, this word Art, in its largest sense, signifies those who take pleasure in their work... Artist-carpenters who adjust with joy dovetails and mortises; artist-masons who handle lovingly their trowels; artist-cab drivers, proud of treating their horses humanely-what an ideal state of society that would be.
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One can never do anything so beautiful as nature.
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Admiration, is a joy daily kindled afresh... I talk out of the -fullness of life; it belongs to me in a sense larger than that of ownership.
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When I was quite young, as far back as I remember, I drew, but the gift is nothing without the will to make it worth while. The artist must have the patience of water that eats away the rock drop by drop.
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The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implements and never uses them.
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The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist.
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Michelangelo, revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this.
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Slowness is a beauty
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You would not believe my suffering... Death would be sweeter... I can't go another day without seeing you. Atrocious madness, it's the end. I won't be able to work any more. Malevolent goddess! And yet I love you furiously.
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If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features.
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The streets of Paris, with their shops of old furniture, etchings, and works of art, are a veritable museum, far less tiring than official museums, and from which one imbibes just as much as one can.
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I sacrificed to the mania of the age, which is to overload things. My modeling is there, the eloquence of the gesture also. The rest would only spoil the essential things. It is a stroke of genius. I am going to write to the under-secretary of state that my monument is ready.
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Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you.
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Now to the great artist, everything in nature has character.
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My principles are the laws of experience.
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I am not at their orders, but at those of Nature! My confreres doubtless have their reasons for working as you have said. But in thus doing violence to nature and treating human beings like puppets, they run the risk of producing lifeless and artificial work...
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I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in esthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.
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The artist must learn the difference between the appearance of an object and the interpretation of this object through his medium. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.
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An artist must possess consummate technique in order to make us forget it.