Rene Magritte Quotes

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

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

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

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

I don't think in words; I think in pictures, in images.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Visualization. It may be the most important part of your mental package.

If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

What's the point in having a mind if you don't use it to make judgements?