Skip to content

You think you're doing something entirely your own, and a year later, you look at it and you see actually the roots of where your art comes from without your knowing it at all.

— Marcel Duchamp Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)

Another quote →

Topics

Art

More quotes by Marcel Duchamp

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.

To be looked at [from the other side of his art-work 'The Glass'] with one eye, close to, for almost an hour.

..paint was always [in history of painting] a means to an end, whether the end was religious, social, decorative or romantic. Now it's become an end in itself..

The only man in the past whom I really respect was Seurat.. .He didn't let his hand interfere with his mind.

I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.

All Marcel Duchamp quotes →

You may also like

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Marcel Duchamp (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.