“If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!”
“What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.”
“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
“Football is the ballet of the masses.”
"The Poet & The City", p. 81
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
"The Protestant Mystics", p. 73
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
Source: "The Subject and Power" (1982), p. 785
Source: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
Part 2, Chapter 6 (page 86)
Notes from Underground (1864)
“Music… can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”
Quote in Monet's letter to art-critic and his friend Gustave Geffroy, 22 June 1890; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 129
1890 - 1900
1850 - 1870
Context: My dear Frédéric Bazille, I ask myself what you can be doing in Paris during fine weather, for I suppose that it must also be very fine there. Here my dear fellow, it is is charming, and I discover every day always beautiful things. It is enough to become mad [fou], so much do I have the desire to do it all, my head is cracking. Damn it, here it is the sixteenth, put aside your cliques and your claques, and come spend a couple of weeks here, it would be the best thing that you could do, because in Paris it cannot be very easy to work.
This very day, I still have a month to stay in; furthermore my sketches are becoming finished, I have even set to work additionally [remis] on some others. In sum, I am content enough with my stay here, even though my studies are very far from what I would wish. It is decidedly frightfully difficult to make something complete in all respects, and I think that there are scarcely any but those who content themselves with the approximate. Very well, my dear fellow, I want to struggle, scrape, start over again [recommencer], because one can do what one sees and understands, and it seems to me, when I see nature, that I am going to do it all, write it all out, but them go try to do it.... when one is on the job..
All this proves that one must only think about this. It is by force of observation and reflection that one finds. So let us grind away and grind away constantly. Are you making any progress? Yes, I am sure of it, but what I am sure of is that you do not work enough and not in the right way. It is not with carefree guys like your Villa and others that you will be able to work. It would be better all alone, and yet, all alone there are plenty of things that one cannot make out. In the end all of this is terrible, and it is a rough task.
... It is frightening what I see in my head.
“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.”
“I want to paint the way a bird sings.”
Variant: I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Source: Monet By Himself
