Home › Authors › Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin Quotes
1840–1917 France
François-Auguste-René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French sculptor, and the preeminent sculptor of the modern era. He played a pivotal role in the art of the late nineteenth century, both excelling at and rebelling against the Beaux-Arts tradition.
Also known as: Rodin
Random Auguste Rodin quote
42 quotes
I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.
One can never do anything so beautiful as nature.
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated.
I am not a rhetorician, but a man of action.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Heads and Tales (1936)
My principles are the laws of experience.
Were this thoroughly understood, industrial art would be entirely revolutionized — industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit.
The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist.
to Rodin in H. Read (1964)
Michelangelo, revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this.
Barye... did not teach us much ; he was always worried and tired when he came, and always told us that it was very good.
This full, pouting mouth, rich in sensuous expressions. these lips like a lake of pleasure, fringed by the noble, palpitating nostrils.
I invent nothing, I rediscover.
Now to the great artist, everything in nature has character.
The Gates of Hell, The Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I do not need.
to Rodin in: Naum Ya. Vilenkin (1958)
Admiration, is a joy daily kindled afresh... I talk out of the -fullness of life; it belongs to me in a sense larger than that of ownership.
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.
to Rodin in: Southwestern Art Vol. 6 (1977)
The great difficulty and crowning glory of art is to paint, to draw, to write, naturally and simply.
It is too evident that if the drawing is bad, the color false, the deepest emotion must fail to express itself.
An artist must possess consummate technique in order to make us forget it.
Topics Auguste Rodin is quoted on
Works