Odilon Redon

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

— Odilon Redon

I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render.

— Odilon Redon

True art lies in a reality that is felt.

— Odilon Redon

It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

— Odilon Redon

“I have tried to put the real at the service of the unreal.”

— Odilon Redon

It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born.

— Odilon Redon

I am repelled by those who voice the word 'nature', without having any trace of it in their hearts.

— Odilon Redon

The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

— Odilon Redon

Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.

— Odilon Redon

The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is…

— Odilon Redon

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

— Odilon Redon

I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

— Odilon Redon

The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that…

— Odilon Redon

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

— Odilon Redon

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual…

— Odilon Redon

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

— Odilon Redon

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

— Odilon Redon

I have a feeling only for shadows

— Odilon Redon

All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

— Odilon Redon

One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it.

— Odilon Redon

The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit.

— Odilon Redon

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

— Odilon Redon

The Artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual…

— Odilon Redon

I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.

— Odilon Redon

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

— Odilon Redon