Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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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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One never paints violently enough.
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Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.
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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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The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.
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The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
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Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.
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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 live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict.
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Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.
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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 things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.
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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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Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born.
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Mythological subjects always new. Modern subjects difficult because of the absence of the nude and the wretchedness of modern costume.
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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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You increase your self-respect when you feel you've done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.
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At a distance this fine oak seems to be of ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the impression changes completely: I see it as big, and even terrifying in its bigness.
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Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
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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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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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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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Can any man say with certainty that he was happy at a particular moment of time which he remembers as being delightful? Remembering it certainly makes him happy, because he realizes how happy he could have been, but at the actual moment when the alleged happiness was occurring, did he really feel happy? He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried.
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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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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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The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.
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Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.
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The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.
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To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.
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One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.
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