Gustave Courbet Quotes

26 quotes in 325 categories

• When I am dead, let it be said of me: he belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, and…
• The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or…
• Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.
• I have never seen either angels or goddesses, so I am not interested in painting them.
• When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important
• France is the only nation in which astoundingly small numbers of civilized patrons reside.
• I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.
• I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
• I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest…
• The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.
• Art is a wholly physical language whose words are all the visible objects.
• I too am a government.
• Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
• I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more…
• To be able to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my times as I see them - in a word, to create a living…
• I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is…
• The state is not competent in artistic matters... When the state leaves us free, it will have carried out its duty.
• It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.
• I hope always to earn my living by my art without having ever deviated by even a hair's breadth from my principles... to please anyone…
• Art or talent, for an artist, is merely a means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the things of the period in…

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