Edgar Degas Quotes

(Art is) the residue of vision.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?