The more one paints, the more one realizes how much there is still to learn.

True art is about bringing something into being that was never there before.

Art allows us to touch the intangible, to express what we cannot say.

The task of the artist is to translate emotion into form.

Life must be captured with feeling, not with cold detachment.

The artist is not a mere copyist of nature; they are a creator of new worlds.

A portrait should reflect the soul of the person, not just their outward appearance.

The art of painting is the art of seeing the unseen.

Art should awaken the imagination, not simply replicate what the eye sees.

An artist must find his own voice, one that is unmistakable and true.

The artist must cultivate an eye that can see both what is there and what is not.

To create is to be alive.

Light and shadow are more important than form.

The human figure is never static in life, and should never be in art.

Art is the closest thing to immortality.

Make people’s portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

Art should have a life of its own.

It is the struggle between the artist’s will and the medium that gives art its strength.

I do not seek perfection; I seek expression.

In the end, the work itself speaks louder than the artist’s intentions.

I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.

Art can convey a truth that words cannot.

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.

I’ll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

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.

What a horrible thing yellow is.

There is no such thing as a correct way to paint; each artist has his own way of approaching the task.

I am not a colorist, I am a draughtsman.

Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.

Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

The object of art is not to copy nature but to make it a reality.

And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.

Even in front of nature one must compose.

There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.

Art is a struggle between the intuition of the soul and the labor of the hands.

Taste! It doesn’t exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

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.

So that’s the telephone? They ring, and you run.

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.

I don’t like to paint flowers. I like to paint moments in life.

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult – the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.

One does not marry art. One ravishes it.

Art is vice. You don’t wed it, you rape it.

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.

What is important is to have a passion for your work.

C’est vrai. Voilá quelqu’un qui sent comme moi. (It is true. There is someone who feels as I do).

I want to be famous but unknown!

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.

Instantaneity is photography.

The artist must be a spectator, a critic, as well as the creator.

There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.

We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?

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.

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.

The difficulty of life is that it is a continual coming to terms with what we see and what we are.

If painting weren’t so difficult, it wouldn’t be fun.

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

There is no such thing as an accident in art.

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.

It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious – to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality – he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it’s charming.

A picture is a thing in which one can store one’s dream.

I’m glad I haven’t found my style yet. I’d be bored to death.

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.

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

It is not the brush but the person holding it who makes the picture.

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

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.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

I am a great admirer of the arts, but I also love the satisfaction of bringing my vision into reality.

The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.

If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.

Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.

The true traveler never arrives.

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn’t painting be too?

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.

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

For those who don’t know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.