Edgar Degas Quotes

85 quotes in 814 categories

• Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.
• So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.
• Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
• My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do…
• What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.
• I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things.
• You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no…
• I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.
• Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.
• I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished…
• One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
• An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.
• The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to…
• A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it…
• Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.
• Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
• Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect…
• It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it…
• In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
• What a horrible thing yellow is.

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