Auguste Renoir Quotes

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

It seems to me that what the artist sees is the simple and obvious that is invisible to everybody else.

Renoir had not only a great interest in human character, in human feeling, but had also a great love for the people he painted.

Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.

To love something as an artist ... means to be shaken not by its ultimate value or lack of value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value it shows things that few have seen. It's conquering, not pacifying.

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.

Beauty lies in nature and reveals, once the artist has perceived it, its own expressive power.

I love going to plays. There's a subconscious side to it, obviously-some people like to be spanked for XYZ psychological reasons, and I like to go to plays, and I can't entirely explain why.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.

I love watching a movie that is smart, that makes me think, that includes me as an audience member, and I especially love it when I know that the people that I'm working with also do that.

I like living near my family, and near the people I understand the best. The landscape of Michigan speaks to me, and the humility and humor of the people here makes sense. It just feels right to live here, in a place where I don't dare put on airs.

I was once arrested with [Allen] Ginsburg. He was a big help to me. He was one of the few people who read unknown writer's work. Maybe he was just hustling me. He liked to flirt, Allen. They called him a monster but he was only falling in love.

I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.

The biggest challenge and the thing I find most enjoyable about being a designer is taking everything in and assimilating it for your perspective, hopefully making it relevant and interesting to people.

The average man cannot believe that an artist may be as serious and highminded an observer of life as the professed man of science.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.

I read somewhere that we are all more than we know. And I really believe that. Everybody is worth something, and think of all the amazing things that you could be to each other, to people you don't even know, of all the things that you could accomplish.

The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there's much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.