Edgar Degas Quotes | Famous Quotations About Art & Leadership

Edgar Degas named Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his work in painting, figure creation, printmaking, and drawing. He is viewed as one of the organizers of the Impressionist movement in spite of the fact that he dismissed the term, and liked to be known as a pragmatist.

Edgar Degas Famous Quotations include:

• Quotes About Art
• Leadership Quotes
• Personality Quotes

Edgar Degas Quotes About Art

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” ― Edgar Degas

“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.” ― Edgar Degas

“A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people” ― Edgar Degas

“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.” ― Edgar Degas

“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 not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.” ― Edgar Degas

“Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance...” ― Edgar Degas

“The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.” ― Edgar Degas

“No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.” ― Edgar Degas

“Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means.” ― Edgar Degas

“One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.” ― Edgar Degas

“Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.” ― Edgar Degas

“One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.” ― Edgar Degas

“Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.” ― Edgar Degas

“Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.” ― Edgar Degas

“Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.” ― Edgar Degas

“In painting, you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.” ― Edgar Degas

“Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.” ― Edgar Degas

“Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.” ― Edgar Degas

“If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun.” ― Edgar Degas

“A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.” ― Edgar Degas

“The frame is the reward of the artist.” ― Edgar Degas

“One does not marry art. One ravishes it.” ― Edgar Degas

“The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.” ― Edgar Degas

“Art is really a battle.” ― Edgar Degas

Inspiring Female Artist Quotes

 

The Bellelli Family by Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas Leadership Quotes

“Success! Success! The enemy of progress!” ― Edgar Degas

“I have seen some very beautiful things through my anger, and what consoles me a little, is that through my anger I do not stop looking...” ― Edgar Degas

“It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.” ― Edgar Degas

“It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.” ― Edgar Degas

“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 point in working.” ― Edgar Degas

“What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.” ― Edgar Degas

“There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.” ― Edgar Degas

“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 imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.” ― Edgar Degas

“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 by the facets and details. It is a battle.” ― Edgar Degas “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.” ― Edgar Degas

“I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of color.” ― Edgar Degas

“Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.” ― Edgar Degas

“One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.” ― Edgar Degas

Fine Art Quotes By Famous Artists

 

Woman Combing Her Hair by Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas Personality Quotes

“Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What a shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?” ― Edgar Degas

“We were created to look at one another, weren't we” ― Edgar Degas

“Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.” ― Edgar Degas

“I would rather do nothing than do a rough sketch without having looked at anything. My memories will do better.” ― Edgar Degas

“I want to be famous but unknown!” ― Edgar Degas

“Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.” ― Edgar Degas

“I have been, or seemed, hard with everyone because I was carried away by a sort of brutality born of my distrust in myself and my ill-humor. I have felt so badly equipped, so soft, in spite of the fact that my attitude towards art seemed to me so just. I was disgusted with everyone, and especially myself.” ― Edgar Degas

“I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.” ― Edgar Degas

“The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.” ― Edgar Degas

“I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end, I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.” ― Edgar Degas

“If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn't want anyone killed. I'd be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.” ― Edgar Degas

“Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.” ― Edgar Degas

“People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.” ― Edgar Degas

20 Famous Edgar Degas Paintings

 

Orchestra Musicians by Edgar Degas

 

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