Claude Monet quotes
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“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Everything changes, even stone.”
-- Claude MonetSource : Joachim Pissarro, Claude Monet (1990). “Monet's cathedral: Rouen 1892-1894”, Pavilion Books, Limited
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“I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that's the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“It is better to have done something than to have been someone.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I had so much fire in me and so many plans...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
-- Claude Monet -
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece”
-- Claude Monet -
“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.”
-- Claude Monet -
“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.”
-- Claude MonetSource : Claude Monet (1985). “Monet: a retrospective”
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“It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.”
-- Claude MonetSource : Claude Monet (1985). “Monet: a retrospective”
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“For almost two months now I've been struggling away with no result.”
-- Claude Monet -
“My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”
-- Claude MonetSource : Claude Monet (2014). “Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters”, Chartwell
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“I haven't yet managed to capture the colour of this landscape; there are moments when I'm appalled at the colours I'm having to use, I'm afraid what I'm doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“One day Boudin said to me, 'Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky.' I took his advice.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.”
-- Claude Monet -
“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.”
-- Claude Monet -
“It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
-- Claude Monet -
“While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose...”
-- Claude Monet -
“Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.”
-- Claude Monet -
“What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.”
-- Claude Monet -
“It is difficult to stop in time because one gets carried away. But I have that strength; it is the only strength I have.”
-- Claude Monet -
“When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.”
-- Claude Monet -
“If only the weather would improve, there'd be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm in a foul mood as I'm making stupid mistakes... This morning I lost beyond repair a painting with which I had been happy, having done about twenty sessions on it; it had to be thoroughly scraped away... what a rage I was in!”
-- Claude Monet -
“I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I'm very happy, very delighted. I'm setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I'm surrounded here by all that I love.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.”
-- Claude Monet -
“When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“The creditors are proving impossible to deal with and short of a sudden appearance on the scene of wealthy art patrons, we are going to be turned out of this dear little house where I led a simple life and was able to work so well. I do not know what will become of us...”
-- Claude Monet -
“It's the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I've only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I've said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him. I came to be fascinated by his studies, the products of what I call instantaneity.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm going to get down to a still life on a size 50 canvas of rayfish and dogfish with old fishermen's baskets. Then I'm going to turn out a few pictures to send wherever possible, given that now, first and foremost - unfortunately - I have to earn some money.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“Nature won't be summoned to order and won't be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I'd go crazy.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I sometimes feel ashamed that I am devoting myself to artistic pursuits while so many of our people are suffering and dying for us. It's true that fretting never did any good.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.”
-- Claude Monet -
“You'll understand, I'm sure that I'm chasing the merest sliver of color. It's my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It's terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most...”
-- Claude Monet -
“One can do something if one can see and understand it...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“Think of me getting up before 6, I'm at work by 7 and I continue until 6.30 in the evening, standing up all the time, nine canvases. It's murderous...”
-- Claude Monet -
“I do have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La Grenouillère, for which I've done some bad pochades (sketches), but it is a dream. Renoir, who have just spent a couple of months here, also wants to paint this subject.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I insist upon 'doing it alone'... I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room...”
-- Claude Monet -
“I still don't know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm enjoying the most perfect tranquillity, free from all worries, and in consequence would like to stay this way forever, in a peaceful corner of the countryside like this.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.”
-- Claude Monet -
“What is it that's taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?”
-- Claude Monet -
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“My rejection at the Salon brought an end to my hesitation [to settle in Paris] since after this failure I can no longer claim to cope... alas, that fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I've been working so hard that I'm exhausted... I feel I won't be able to do without a few weeks' rest, so I'm going off to see the sea.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I'm exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I've set out to do.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I will bring lots of studies back with me so I can work on some big things at home.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.”
-- Claude Monet -
“It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs - that way starvation lies.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Canvases between 8 centimetres and 1 metre are priced around 25,000 francs. In the past I used to sell them from between 50 to 100 francs at the most. I have to say... that I feel somewhat embarrassed at this admission.”
-- Claude Monet -
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“I can no longer work outside because of the intensity of the light.”
-- Claude Monet -
“It would be a very bad idea... to exhibit even a small number of this new series, as the whole effect can only be achieved from an exhibition of the entire group.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I am pleased with the exhibition... everything on display was sold for a good price to decent people. It has been a long time since I believed that you could educate public taste...”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm quite content: although what I'm doing is far from being as I should like, I am complemented often enough all the same...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.”
-- Claude Monet -
“No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I'm getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but... I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me...”
-- Claude Monet -
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“My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red...But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections.”
-- Claude Monet -
“I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.”
-- Claude Monet -
“Thanks to my work everything's going well; it's a great consolation.”
-- Claude Monet -
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