50 quotes
He [ Corot ] is always the strongest, he has foreseen everything.
What a pity we allowed ourselves to be called Impressionists.
Drawing is not the same as form; it is a way of seeing form.
Degas Dance Drawing (1935)
You need the natural life; I, the artificial.
I believe Corot painted a tree better that any of us, but still I find him superior in his figures.
The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.
An Intimate Portrait (1927)
A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.
Degas Dance Drawing (1935)
There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
I will not admit that a woman can draw like that.
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 colour.
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.
Notebook entry (1858)
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.
Degas Dance Drawing (1935)
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.
Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927)
It is all well and good to copy what one sees, but it is much better to draw only what remains in one's memory. This is a transformation in which imagination and memory collaborate.
Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.
The study of nature is of no significance, for painting is a conventional art, and it is infinitely more worthwhile to learn to draw after w:Holbein.
Degas Dance Drawing (1935)
I'm glad to say I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.
Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927)
Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.