“The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.”
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Famous Edgar Degas Quotes
“There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.”
“Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.”
Source: Degas: The Uncontested Master
“Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.”
Source: The shop-talk of Edgar Degas
Source: Letters
“I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.”
Source: Degas [exposition]
“An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.”
Source: The shop-talk of Edgar Degas
“Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.”
Source: The shop-talk of Edgar Degas
“Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.”
Source: The shop-talk of Edgar Degas
Source: The shop-talk of Edgar Degas
Source: The shop-talk of Edgar Degas
“In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.”
Source: Degas' Ballet Dancers
“Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement”
Source: Pastels
“Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.”
Source: Degas [exposition]
“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.”
“Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.”
“Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.”
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”
“Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.”
Source: Degas As a Collector
Source: Letters
“A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.”
“People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.”
“The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.”