Auguste Rodin Quotes [Famous Quotes About Beauty]

"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need," is a famous quote by Auguste Rodin, a renowned French sculptor. He was known for his modern sculptures created with traditional materials and his ability to sculpt complex, realistic surfaces with clay. Rodin lived from 1840-1917 and won the Grand Prix de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts twelve times.

Despite facing criticism and controversy, Rodin refused to compromise his unique style and eventually gained favor in the government and art world.

He was known for his realism, intensity, and sensuality in his works, which were often inspired by everyday life and its events. Rodin believed that creativity comes from reflection and meditation on life, which should be expressed in art.

Famous Auguste Rodin Quotes

"The artist is the confidant of nature; flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs toward him." - Auguste Rodin

"What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty." - Auguste Rodin

"There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth." - Auguste Rodin

"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." - Auguste Rodin

"There should be no argument in regard to morality in art. There is no morality in nature." - Auguste Rodin

"In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred." - Auguste Rodin

"There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period." - Auguste Rodin 

"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need." - Auguste Rodin

"Now color...is the flower of fine modeling. 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." - Auguste Rodin

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and there defines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated." - Auguste Rodin

"Recently I have taken to isolating limbs, the torso. Why am I blamed for it? Why is the head allowed and not portions of the body? Every part of the human figure is expressive." - Auguste Rodin

-writing to his lover Camille Claudel...

"Have pity, mean girl. I can't go on. I can't go another day without seeing you. Atrocious madness, it's the end, I won't be able to work anymore. Malevolent goddess, and yet I love you furiously." - Auguste Rodin

"What is this drawing? Not once in describing the shape of that mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see." - Auguste Rodin

"My drawings are the result of my sculpture." - Auguste Rodin

"The delicate droop of the petals standing out in relief is like the eyelid of a child." - Auguste Rodin

"Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature." - Auguste Rodin

"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." - Auguste Rodin

-talking about an antique marble copy of the Venus de' Medici...

"It is truly flesh! You would think it molded by kisses and caresses! You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm." - Auguste Rodin

"He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist." - Auguste Rodin

"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." - Auguste Rodin

"Genius only comes to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence." - Auguste Rodin

"The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others." - Auguste Rodin

"Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings." - Auguste Rodin

"The artist has only to trust his eyes." - Auguste Rodin

"Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness." - Auguste Rodin

"The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal." - Auguste Rodin

"Nobody does good to men with impunity." - Auguste Rodin

"To the artist, there is never anything ugly in nature." - Auguste Rodin

"In front of the model, I work with the same will to reproduce the truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me." - Auguste Rodin

"The sculptor represents the transition from one pose to another...he indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work, we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be." - Auguste Rodin

"If the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended." - Auguste Rodin

"Mystery is like a kind of atmosphere which bathes the greatest works of the masters." - Auguste Rodin

"Man's naked form... belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages." - Auguste Rodin

"I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god." - Auguste Rodin

"The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning." - Auguste Rodin

"I invent nothing. I rediscover." - Auguste Rodin

"I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age." - Auguste Rodin

"How painful it is to find that my figure can be of no help to my future... how painful to see it rejected on account of a slanderous suspicion!" - Auguste Rodin

"I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling." - Auguste Rodin 

"As paradoxical as it may seem a great sculptor is as much a colorist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one, as much as the most charming etchings." - Auguste Rodin

"Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump." - Auguste Rodin

"Black is the queen of colors." - Auguste Rodin

"It is the artist who is truthful, while the photographer is mendacious; for, in reality, time never stops cold." - Auguste Rodin

"An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth but also, and above all, the inner truth." - Auguste Rodin

"A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character...the artist, on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature." - Auguste Rodin

"If we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy..." - Auguste Rodin

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." - Auguste Rodin

"To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth." - Auguste Rodin

"There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect." - Auguste Rodin

"You must always work." - Auguste Rodin

"The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion — life... The sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes." - Auguste Rodin

"In short, Beauty is everywhere. It is not that she is lacking to our eye, but our eyes which fail to perceive her. Beauty is character and expression. Well, there is nothing in nature which has more character than the human body. In its strength and its grace, it evokes the most varied images. One moment it resembles a flower: the bending torso is the stalk; the breasts, the head, and the splendor of the hair answer to the blossoming of the corolla. The next moment it recalls the pliant creeper or the proud and upright sapling." - Auguste Rodin

"The more simple we are, the more complete we become." - Auguste Rodin

"The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!" - Auguste Rodin

"I will have no other woman... Mlle Camille will become my wife." - Auguste Rodin

"The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that." - Auguste Rodin

"The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed." - Auguste Rodin

"The artist enriches the soul of humanity. The artist delights people with a thousand different shades of feeling." - Auguste Rodin

"Man enjoys living on the edge of his dreams and neglects the real things of the world which are so beautiful. The ignorant and indifferent destroy beautiful things merely by looking at the marble. Things that remake the soul of him who understands them." - Auguste Rodin

"Love your calling with passion, it is the meaning of your life." - Auguste Rodin

"Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools." - Auguste Rodin

"Where shall we begin? There is no beginning. Start where you arrive. Stop before what entices you. And work! You will enter little by little into the entirety. Method will be born in proportion to your interest." - Auguste Rodin

"Patience is also a form of action." - Auguste Rodin

"Art is the pleasure of a spirit that enters nature and discovers that it too has a soul." - Auguste Rodin

"You will make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures." - Auguste Rodin

"People say I think too much about women, yet, after all, what is there more important to think about?" - Auguste Rodin

"One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience." - Auguste Rodin

"The dazzling splendor revealed to the artist by the model that divests herself of her clothes has the effect of the sun piercing the clouds. Venus, Eve, these are feeble terms to express the beauty of women." - Auguste Rodin

"Inside you, there's an artist you don't know about." - Auguste Rodin

"I am like a moon that shines on an immense, unknown sea where ships never pass." - Auguste Rodin

"The nude alone is well dressed." - Auguste Rodin

"The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams." - Auguste Rodin

"True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure." - Auguste Rodin

"I would have to talk for a year to repeat a single one of my works with words." - Auguste Rodin

"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop." - Auguste Rodin

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