Edgar Degas quotes

Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his contributions to Impressionism, particularly his paintings of dancers. His innovative approach combined classical techniques with modern subjects, capturing movement and everyday life. He is recognized for his mastery of drawing, composition, and his influence on later generations of artists. Here are 71 of his quotes:

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

Edgar Degas

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

Edgar Degas

It is all well and good to copy what one sees, but it is much better to draw only what remains in one's memory. This is a transformation in which imagination and memory collaborate.

Edgar Degas

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

Edgar Degas

You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.

Edgar Degas

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

Edgar Degas

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Edgar Degas

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

Edgar Degas

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.

Edgar Degas

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

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

Edgar Degas

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

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

Edgar Degas

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

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.

Edgar Degas

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

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

Edgar Degas

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

I should like to be famous and unknown.

Edgar Degas

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

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.

Edgar Degas

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