Redon's Quotes

#1. It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

Odilon Redon

#2. The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

Odilon Redon

#3. Honesty shakes the foundation of civilization.

Christina Dodd

#4. The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the artist has set for himself.

Odilon Redon

#5. Black is the most essential of all colors. Above all, if I may say so, it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health ... One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it.

Odilon Redon

#6. Keep in mind the roots of violence: Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance ... the taproot ... the killer's ultimate and truest motivation ... is the hatred of truth ... the hatred of truth is a vice. From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder.

Dean Koontz

#7. My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

Odilon Redon

#8. I just wish I had something stronger than Pepsi in the car that night!" *

Ryan Sprague

#9. Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.

Odilon Redon

#10. I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

Odilon Redon

#11. While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality ... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

Odilon Redon

#12. The ignorant Insults of Individuals will not hinder me from doing my duty to my Art

William Blake

#13. I am repelled by those who voice the word 'nature', without having any trace of it in their hearts.

Odilon Redon

#14. My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

Odilon Redon

#15. Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

Odilon Redon

#16. What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

Odilon Redon

#17. I have a feeling only for shadows

Odilon Redon

#18. The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit.

Odilon Redon

#19. I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render.

Odilon Redon

#20. It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born.

Odilon Redon

#21. I have tried to put the real at the service of the unreal.

Odilon Redon

#22. The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.

Odilon Redon

#23. Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

George Bernard Shaw

#24. All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

Odilon Redon

#25. One of the duties of fortitude is to keep the weak from receiving injury; another, to check the wrong motions of our own souls; a third, both to disregard humiliations, and to do what is right with an even mind. All these clearly ought to be fulfilled by all Christians, and especially by the clergy.

Saint Ambrose

#26. Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

Odilon Redon

#27. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to say yes, only to have my plans fall through at the last minute and I can take off my regular-people clothes and redon my paint-splattered yoga pants.

Jen Lancaster

#28. One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism

Odilon Redon

#29. MIMIC He who repeats what he does not understand is no better than an ass that is loaded with books. WM-ST-63

Kahlil Gibran

#30. And we will test you with evil and with good; and unto us shall ye be brought back.

Elijah Muhammad

#31. I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

J.M. Coetzee

#32. The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

Odilon Redon

#33. I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.

Odilon Redon