Top 100 Degas's Quotes
#1. In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.
John Berger
#2. In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual.
John Berger
#3. 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
#4. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
#5. The human quality Degas most admired was endurance.
John Berger
#7. 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.
Edgar Degas
#8. Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.
Edgar Degas
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
Edgar Degas
#13. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.
Edgar Degas
#14. There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible.
A. Alfred Taubman
#15. The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.
Edgar Degas
#16. I put it (a still life of a pear, made by Manet, ed.) there (on the wall, next to Ingres' Jupiter, ed.), for a pear like that would overthrow any god.
Edgar Degas
#17. Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations ... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.
Edgar Degas
#18. When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#19. I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.
Edgar Degas
#20. 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
#21. There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.
Edgar Degas
#22. Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas
#23. One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,
'the way one commits a crime.
Elizabeth Bishop
#24. 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
#25. 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 shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?
Edgar Degas
#26. The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.
Edgar Degas
#27. It is people's movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree - and so should we.
Edgar Degas
#28. One does not marry art. One ravishes it.
Edgar Degas
#29. Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.
Edgar Degas
#30. Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.
Edgar Degas
#31. Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valery
#32. You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.
Edgar Degas
#33. We were created to look at one another, weren't we
Edgar Degas
#34. It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.
Edgar Degas
#35. 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
#36. A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.
Edgar Degas
#37. Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'
Edgar Degas
#38. I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodies, their stiff stays, their toes whereupon they spin like peg-tops, above all upon that chambermaid face. They might have looked timeless, Remeses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit!
W.B.Yeats
#39. Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.
Edgar Degas
#40. The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.
Edgar Degas
#41. Wine is a sensual pleasure. Its real value is when it splashes into the glass. It is not in the category of a Degas painting. The point is not for people to go to their cellar and stroke their bottles.
Serena Sutcliffe
#42. Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.
Edgar Degas
#43. Drawing is your understanding of form.
Edgar Degas
#45. 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
#46. These women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition ... it is as though one were watching through a keyhole.
Edgar Degas
#47. 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
#48. The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.
Edgar Degas
#49. Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance ...
Edgar Degas
#50. People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.
Edgar Degas
#51. Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
Edgar Degas
#52. What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.
Paul Valery
#53. The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.
Edgar Degas
#54. Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting.
Edgar Degas
#55. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
Jamie Wyeth
#56. I really became convinced I wanted to tell the story of the real-life model for the Degas sculpture 'Little Dancer Aged 14,' which was unveiled in 1881, the Belle Epoque.
Cathy Marie Buchanan
#57. Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.
Edgar Degas
#58. There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.
Edgar Degas
#59. There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
Edgar Degas
#60. The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life.
Mary Cassatt
#61. An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.
Edgar Degas
#62. What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.
Edgar Degas
#63. Manet also had an argument with Degas, the end result being that they each returned paintings that they had previous given to each other.
Doris Lanier
#64. I should like to be famous and unknown.
Edgar Degas
#65. 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
#66. The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.
Edgar Degas
#67. Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed.
Max Liebermann
#68. I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture.
Edgar Degas
#69. The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.
Edgar Degas
#70. A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs! ...
Paul Gauguin
#72. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
Edgar Degas
#73. Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
Edgar Degas
#74. Everybody has talent at
twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.
Edgar Degas
#75. There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.
Edgar Degas
#76. I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!
Edgar Degas
#77. So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.
Edgar Degas
#78. Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.
Edgar Degas
#79. 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
#80. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Edgar Degas
#81. What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.
Edgar Degas
#82. Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.
Irving Stone
#83. In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
Edgar Degas
#84. 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
#85. A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.
Edgar Degas
#86. Even in front of nature one must compose.
Edgar Degas
#87. If painting weren't so difficult, it wouldn't be fun.
Edgar Degas
#88. 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
#89. A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.
Edgar Degas
#90. Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.
Edgar Degas
#92. Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.
Edgar Degas
#93. No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Edgar Degas
#94. Sometimes it made him [Degas] furious that he could not find a chink in my armor, and there would be months when we just could not see each other, and then something I painted would bring us together again.
Mary Cassatt
#95. I would rather do nothing than do a rough sketch without having looked at anything. My memories will do better.
Edgar Degas
#96. If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.
Edgar Degas
#97. Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets.
John Berger
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.
Edgar Degas
