Edgar Degas Quotes

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

I've relaxed my feelings about other companies performing my works. I have never in principle been against my ballets being danced by other companies. Rather, it is that we lack the time, space and money to insure that they are done well. To me, the only sin is mediocrity.

I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

The artist is the lover of nature; therefore he is her slave and her master.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

You're an enemy of art and I pity your ignorance," Domingo said.

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

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

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

[Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.