Auguste Rodin Quotes:

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

source: - Southwestern Art Vol. 6, p. 20, 1977.

Topics: Art, Creativity, Fire

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

source: - "Heads and Tales". Book by Malvina Hoffman, p. 47, 1936.

Topics: Inspirational, Leadership, Summer, Experiencing Things, Value Of Life

Patience is also a form of action.

Topics: Patience, Work, Excellence

The more simple we are, the more complete we become.

Topics: Simple, Simplicity

I invent nothing, I rediscover.

source: - "Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works". Book by Camille Mauclair (p. 60-61), 1905.

Topics: Life, Beautiful, Art

There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.

Topics: Nature, Eye, Giving

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms, Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.

Topics: Flower, Artist, Bending, Creating Art, Confidant

Love your calling with passion, it is the meaning of your life.

Topics: Love, Marriage, Passion

If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.

source: - Auguste Rodin, Paul Gsell (1983). “Rodin on Art and Artists: Conversations with Paul Gsell”, p.54, Courier Corporation

Topics: Photography, Character, Artist, Resemblance

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature

Topics: Artist, Ugly, Environment, Nature And Art

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.

source: - Auguste Rodin (2012). “Rodin on Art and Artists”, p.1, Courier Corporation

Topics: Art, Creativity, Serenity, Fine Artists, Artists And Life

I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god.

Topics: Admiration, Worship

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Topics: Art, Passion, Men, True Artists

Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.

Topics: School, Clouds, Tree

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop

Topics: Photography, Lying, Artist

The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.

Topics: Body, Envelopes, Spirit

What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.

Topics: Art, Art Is, Ugliness

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

Topics: Witty, Art, Block

Nobody does good to men with impunity.

Topics: Men, Doe, Impunity

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

source: - "Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works". Book by Auguste Rodin, p. 61-63, 1905.

Topics: Art, Sculpture, Holes, Sculpting

The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others.

Topics: Men, Expression, Color

Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.

Topics: Beauty, Men, People

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!

source: - "The Origins of Creativity". Book by Karl H. Pfenninger, ‎Valerie R. Shubik, ‎Bruce Adolphe (p. 50), 2001.

Topics: Artist, Men, Being An Artist

As paradoxical as it may seem a great sculptor is as much a colourist as the best painter, or rather the best engraver. He plays so skillfully with all the resources of relief, he blends so well the boldness of light with the modesty of shadow, that his sculptures please one, as much as the most charming etchings.

Topics: Light, Play, Shadow, Etching, Sculptors

Where shall we begin? There is no beginning. Start where you arrive. Stop before what entices you. And work! You will enter little by little into the entirety. Method will be born in proportion to your interest.

Topics: Work, Littles, Born

An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.

Topics: Art, Names, Should, Exterior

What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

Topics: Eye, Hands, Drawing

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

Topics: Drawing, Sculpture, Results

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

Topics: Art, Principles, Methodology

In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.

Topics: Sight, Portraits, Comfort, Human Form

The nude alone is well dressed

Topics: Well Dressed, Wells

Black is the queen of colours.

Topics: Queens, Black, Colour

Man enjoys living on the edge of his dreams and neglects the real things of the world which are so beautiful. The ignorant and indifferent destroy beautiful things merely by looking at the marble. Things that remake the soul of him who understands them.

Topics: Beautiful, Dream, Real, Living On The Edge

I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.

Topics: Fighting, Age, Spirit

You must always work.

If we now seek the spiritual significance of the technique of Michelangelo we shall find that his sculpture expressed restless energy...

Topics: Spiritual, Technique, Energy

How painful it is to find that my figure can be of no help to my future... how painful to see it rejected on account of a slanderous suspicion!

Topics: Rejection, Helping, Painful

If the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended.

Topics: Artist, Accomplishment, Movement, Suspended

The delicate droop of the petals standing out in relief, is like the eyelid of a child.

Topics: Children, Relief, Standing Out, Eyelids, Petals

A mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art, because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character... the artist on the contrary, sees; that is to say, his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature.

Topics: Art, Character, Eye, Bosoms

There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.

source: - Auguste Rodin, Paul Gsell (1983). “Rodin on Art and Artists: Conversations with Paul Gsell”, p.20, Courier Corporation

Topics: Art, Truth, Character

Even with all the documents, you can never forge nature

In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred.

source: - "The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin". Book by Albert Edward Elsen, p. 131, July 1, 1985.

Topics: Art, Sacred, Art Is

The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams.

Topics: Dream, Reality, Ambitious

The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that.

Topics: Photography, Mirrors, Soul, Human Body

Art is the pleasure of a spirit that enters nature and discovers that it too has a soul.

Topics: Art, Soul, Spirit

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Topics: Art, Different, Looks

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

Topics: Beautiful, Book, Eye, Open Book, Accepting The Truth

Recently I have taken to isolating limbs, the torso. Why am I blamed for it? Why is the head allowed and not portions of the body? Every part of the human figure is expressive.

Topics: Taken, Body, Torso

The sculptor represents the transition from one pose to another he indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be.

Topics: Transition, Firsts, Stills

Genius only comes to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.

Topics: Eye, Genius, Use

In short, Beauty is everywhere. It is not that she is lacking to our eye, but our eyes which fail to perceive her. Beauty is character and expression. Well, there is nothing in nature which has more character than the human body. In its strength and its grace it evokes the most varied images. One moment it resembles a flower: the bending torso is the stalk; the breasts, the head, and the splendor of the hair answer to the blossoming of the corolla. The next moment it recalls the pliant creeper, or the proud and upright sapling.

Topics: Flower, Character, Eye, Creepers, Torso

Mystery is like a kind of atmosphere which bathes the greatest works of the masters.

source: - Auguste Rodin (2012). “Rodin on Art and Artists”, p.81, Courier Corporation

Topics: Atmosphere, Kind, Mystery

I am like a moon that shines on an immense, unknown sea where ships never pass

Topics: Moon, Sea, Shining

One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience...

Topics: Having Patience

I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.

Topics: Artist, Doe, Emotion, Hidden Truth

He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist.

Topics: Real, Artist, Discouraged, Real Artists

People say I think too much about women, yet, after all what is there more important to think about?

Topics: Thinking, People, Important

The artist enriches the soul of humanity. The artist delights people with a thousand different shades of feeling.

Topics: Artist, People, Feelings

There should be no argument in regard to morality in art. There is no morality in nature.

Topics: Art, Morality, Argument

The work of art is already within the block of marble. I just chop off whatever isn't needed.

Topics: Art, Block, Needed

One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience.

Topics: Having Patience

There is no need to create. Genius comes only to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.

source: - "Rodin on Art".

Topics: Eye, Genius, Use

Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings.

source: - Albert Edward Elsen, Auguste Rodin (1980). “In Rodin's studio: a photographic record of sculpture in the making”, Cornell Univ Pr

Topics: Photography, Inspire, Feelings, Exactitude

I would have to talk for a year to repeat a single on of my works with words.

Topics: Years, Repeats

The artist has only to trust his eyes.

source: - Auguste Rodin (2012). “Rodin on Art and Artists”, p.11, Courier Corporation

Topics: Eye, Artist, His Eyes

There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.

source: - Auguste Rodin, Paul Gsell (1984). “Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell”, p.109, Univ of California Press

Topics: Spiritual, Art, Powerful, Cascade, Flood Likes

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Topics: Photography, Art, Believe, Babbling